


Shadow Walker

by peacensafety



Series: Shadows [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, BAMF Stiles, Derek/Stiles same age, Growing Up, Multi, POV Stiles, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:49:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacensafety/pseuds/peacensafety
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles keeps a lot of secrets from everyone. It's all he knows. 'Course, it doesn't help that people are always hiding things from him, too. </p>
<p>Hopefully, his new best friend Laura can help him out... as long as he can handle being around her brother for extended periods of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Seventh Grade

**Author's Note:**

> This is an extremely slow-burn Sterek. It will happen! It's just going to take a while.
> 
> Also, Stiles is Jewish. It worked with the story. I am not Jewish, but I had the opportunity to study Mysticism with a professor during college and I attended Temple so that I could write my papers. No offense intended, and nothing that I write should be taken as fact or anything other than a tool used for story-telling purposes.
> 
> You don't have to read the other story in this series, but if you want things to move along a little more quickly you might as well. It's the exact same story, only this is told in a lot more detail. I had all this floating around in my head while I was writing the other story, but it kept coming out too fast to deal with any of it in any kind of logical manner. I hope that this answers some of the questions that were asked from Shadows in the Room.

The sun poured into the new bedroom, motes of dust floating in the rays that streamed in from the outside. Stiles lay on his stomach, feeling it churn in anxious worry and kind of making him want to throw up. His alarm wasn’t going to go off for another eight minutes, but he figured he might as well get up. 

His dad was already at work, so Stiles turned the speakers for his iPod up as loud as he could get them. It was an Apocalyptica type of morning, and the cellos sang furiously from the tiny system. Stiles could hear it while he took his morning shower, and still when he was down in the kitchen making frozen waffles. He ate quickly before he went back up the stairs to get his new backpack, stuff the iPod into the front zipper where there was an opening for his headphones. He walked through the new house, hitting the walls as he went by stumbling into them or not remembering they were there and he wished that his mother was there to fill up some of the empty space. She wasn’t though; she never would be again.

Last year, for the first day of school, his mother had made him chocolate chip pancakes and had taken him to school in her car. Last year, she had told him that his first year of middle school was going to be awesome, and that she had hoped he would enjoy it like she had always imagined American middle school would be fun. Stiles had, and he had joined up with his friends as soon as she dropped him off, and they had all waved at her after she took their picture together. 

His friends had been there for the funeral, and they had helped him pack his room up. They had thrown him a good-bye party just last week. 

Stiles got onto the school bus, sitting towards the middle, and staring out the window when he realized that most of the kids around him were ignoring him. It was okay, he told himself, they would probably be his friends later. Hopefully. Maybe not. It wasn’t like Stiles had ever been popular at his old school. Most of his friends were kids of his mother’s friends, so they knew how to react to him when he got hyper or super-focused, which could happen at any given time without warning. 

His mom told him it would quit when he learned how to control it, their secret, the stuff that he could never, ever talk about until after his Bar Mitzvah. The stuff that he had accidentally been doing since he hit puberty, the stuff his mom was supposed to help him out with. 

Stiles blinked a little, realizing that the bus was stopping in front of a large building with white letters sticking out over the top labeling it as Beacon Hills Jr. High. His dad had brought him to the school just yesterday to do his transfer papers and to take a short tour. Stiles knew that there were three different elementary schools that poured into the school, so even though he had been out of elementary school for a year the rest of the kids had stayed in elementary for sixth grade. His homeroom teacher, Mrs. Deaton, assured him that no one would know he was new, so they would all be starting on the same foot. All he had to do was find his homeroom, and then he would get his schedule.

The junior high was a pretty big building because it was the only one in the county. There were six seventh grade homerooms, where Stiles was told they would stay for most of the day doing basic paperwork, go to a welcome ceremony, go to lunch, and then do a quick run-through of their classes until they went home.

His homeroom was made up of people with last names towards the end of the alphabet, starting with Smith, Ronald. Alphabet, Stiles’s brain took a hold of the word, Aleph, Bet, Hebrew school flickered through his head. He forced himself to concentrate. He found the homeroom that had his name on the list at the door, fortunately listing him by his nick-name instead of the Polish name that was on his birth certificate. His dad had made it clear that Stiles would not answer to that name, and apparently the school was organized enough that they had already changed it… either that or his teacher was too cowardly to make an attempt at pronunciation. 

No one talked to him the entire morning. It was a good thing, Stiles told himself. A good thing that they were all concentrating on Jackson Whittemore, who was also in his class. Stiles could tell that there was a definite social hierarchy at this school, and it didn’t take very long to figure out that Jackson was at the top of it.

The home room teacher went through the Beacon Hills Jr. High School Handbook, explained block scheduling that actually sounded kind of like torture to Stiles, passed out the school planner which contained bathroom passes that Stiles figured quickly were like a form of currency amongst the student population as they were only allowed three a semester, assigned lockers, and then finally passed out schedules. Stiles’s schedule was a different color than everyone else’s, but the teacher took him aside and explained that it was because he was in the Gifted and Talented program that meant he would be taking primarily eighth grade classes and three high school classes. There were fourteen other kids in the school that were on the same team as he was, which was twice the number they had every other year. 

“Nerd,” Jackson whispered as Stiles went back and sat in his seat. 

Stiles stayed quiet. It wasn’t a name he hadn’t ever been called before, both at school and Hebrew school that he studied at after school. 

When it was finally time to attend the convocation in the gymnasium, Stiles was relieved. Maybe there was someone here he could sit with. As he scanned the crowd though, he felt the hope inside of him die a little bit. Everyone was sitting with someone, and it looked like they had all been friends forever. Stiles made his way to the back of the bleachers, and he leaned back against the wall while all the other kid from his homeroom spread out.

Stiles saw Jackson greeting some other kids from the other homerooms. There were three boys in particular that gathered around him, and all three of them looked like models from a Gap magazine. One of the boys in particular was so beautiful it actually physically hurt Stiles to see him, he was a little taller and had thick black hair that waved gently, and even across the bleachers he could see the boy’s eyes were so lightly colored it almost dragged attention away from the rest of his face. 

Stiles went back to paying attention to the other kids around him. He noticed that Jackson and his friends kind of sat near two girls in particular, one with black hair that sat next to the beautiful boy that he had noticed earlier and the other girl with shocking strawberry blond hair, who sat with perfect posture and crossed her legs. She glared at anyone who tried to talk to her or the girl next to her, although the girl with black hair seemed very friendly to most of the people who tried to talk to her.

The convocation was an exercise in boredom. The cheerleaders did some sort of acrobatic mess to bass heavy music, the sports teams were lined up and cheered for mostly by the cheerleaders, there were clubs that did presentations and the choir and the band performed, and then it was finally lunch. 

Stiles spent lunch in the bathroom, rather than hang out in the lunch room by himself. 

The classes that were to make up Stiles’s daily life were literally filled with fifteen kids. They stared at each other warily as teachers came in and out of their classroom, because they weren't going to be switching classes at all. They went over syllabi, and discussed field trips and a weekly trip to the high school. They discussed early high school graduation and what it would take to fulfill those requirements. The teachers told them that the kids in this track often formed a student-led Facebook group where the teacher didn't have access, and that they often formed a study group together and had nights where they wouldn't leave each others’ houses. They weren't sure what they were going to do with a group this big, but they knew the kids would think of something. 

They played a few games towards the middle of the afternoon while they were waiting for some kids who had been in the AP program in high school to come talk to them. Stiles found out the girl with dark hair who had been sitting close to the beautiful boy during convocation was Laura Hale, and the strawberry-blond girl next to her was Lydia Martin. They had both stared at Stiles while everyone was introducing themselves, and they both looked interested when he told everyone he had just moved to Beacon Hills because his dad had gotten a new job there. 

It didn’t take long for this group of kids to figure out his dad was the new Sheriff. 

The AP kids from high school talked for about fifteen minutes, but the best part of them being there was that they brought cupcakes. They said that they worked with the AP kids while they were in middle school and that it had helped their transition, and that they could be called if they needed help with tutoring or tips on how to study better. 

Stiles knew this was a pretty good set-up for such a small school system, and he was a little impressed with it. 

Laura immediately invited Stiles over to her house after school, and Stiles accepted because the only thing he has waiting for him at home were boxes and lots and lots of unpacking. His dad was going to be at work until late, mostly setting up his office there and doing a meet and greet with his new officers, and Stiles didn’t really like being on his own all that much.

Laura lived in one of the biggest houses that Stiles had ever seen, and both of her parents and her uncle were home when she got there. Her twin brother was at some sort of sports practice, but she had three younger siblings, one of which was a newborn baby that Stiles made stupid faces at for almost an hour. 

Laura’s mom asked Stiles lots of questions about his family, but she was quiet as soon as Stiles informed her that his mother’s funeral was just last month and that he and his dad were the only ones left in America. He told her that his grandmother and lots of his mother’s brothers and sisters still lived in Poland, and she sounded delighted that his mother chose to teach him not only Polish but Hebrew also, and even Laura looked impressed when he sang some of the verses from his Bar Mitzvah that he had memorized. 

Stiles was getting ready to leave when Laura’s twin brother came into the house. It was the beautiful boy that was hanging out with Jackson, and he heard Laura say his name in an annoyed sort of voice. “Derek,” she said, rolling her eyes. 

Stiles felt for sure that the boy’s name was the sound his heart was making, but he refused to look up at him and was a little relieved that Derek didn’t even seem to notice him until the Sheriff’s car pulled up in front of the Hale House to pick Stiles up. 

Thus started seventh grade. He and Laura and Lydia were best friends, and that was all kinds of great. He passed all of his classes with straight-As, fumbled every single time that Derek walked into a room, and then, before he knew it, was packed off for the summer to his Babcia’s in Poland. 

Babcia had started calling his dad at Christmas, demanding to see her grandson for the summer. Stiles’s dad protested, there just wasn't the kind of money that Stiles needed to pull off plane tickets available on a Sheriff’s salary. Babcia said pish-posh, like literally she said pish-posh which Stiles didn’t think anyone ever did outside of a movie, and so during the second week of summer Stiles was sent to go live with her. 

Babcia lived in an honest-to-precious castle. It has stone walls and turrets and large stained glass windows and rooms that served no other purpose than to just be there. Stiles got an entire floor in a wing to himself, with fourteen rooms and a ridiculous bathroom and a conservatory that grew all sorts of fascinating plants. 

Stiles had no idea his mother’s family were gazillionaires, to be honest. 

Babcia spent the summer teaching him how to ride horses, how to play polo, how to dress to impress and how to talk to visiting dignitaries. Stiles wasn’t going to inherit a title or anything, that would land on his Uncle Aaron's shoulders, but he was a part of the family and they weren't going to be ashamed of him just because his dad was an American. His uncles talk to him about his studies in the Torah and seemed pleased that he has progressed the way that he had, and his Babcia finally took him out to a field on horseback after his first month there.

“Darling,” she said, “You know that you can tell your Babcia anything, right?” 

“Um,” Stiles stuttered a little bit. 

“I’ve heard absolutely everything at my age, Przemysław,” his grandmother said his name. His name has always made him still inside, possibly because the only time he had ever heard anyone say it was when he was in trouble. “Even if you think it’s weird, you can tell me.” 

Stiles swallowed. He felt like he should say something, but he had no idea what that could possibly be. “I think I’m gay,” he offers.

His grandmother looked at him for a whole minute before she laughed. She laughed really loudly, too, like it was the most hilarious thing she had ever heard. Stiles didn’t think it was that funny, and was about to be insulted before she took a gasping breath. “I’m happy for you,” she gasped. 

“No, not gay like happy, gay like… I like boys,” Stiles tried to correct, wondering if he should repeat himself in Polish so that there wouldn’t be a language barrier.

“No, I know what gay means,” his grandmother told him, “Agnieszka already told me that she thought you might be. No, I’m happy that you told me.”

“Mom knew?” Stiles asked his grandmother. 

“She thought that you might tell us you were bi when you were this age, and then come all the way out when you were closer to the tail end of high school, but you always did things early, didn’t you?” 

Stiles smiled. It felt good that his mom knew him so well.

“She wanted us to know how to take care of you,” his grandmother said. “I don’t think that being gay is weird, though, darling. I was asking about something else in particular.”

Stiles stared at her. “I’m kind of smart?” 

His grandmother shook her head. “Most of our family members are smart. No, there’s something else.”

They walked their horses to a clearing where there had been a large pile of sticks set up. Stiles thought it would make a pretty big bonfire, if they were lit. 

“I want you to tell me what the word for fire is in Hebrew,” his grandmother said.

He told her, and she nodded. “Now, look at the pile of sticks and say it again.”

Stiles obeyed her, thinking it was strange. Nothing happened. 

His grandmother looked disappointed. “Hm,” she said. “Maybe Hebrew won’t work for you. Concentrate on the meaning of the word, and try again.”

Stiles did so, and again nothing happened. 

“Maybe you just don’t have it, like the rest of the family,” his grandmother muttered. “Well, maybe you take after your American father too much.”

Stiles was confused. “Was something supposed to happen?” he asked.

“You are part of this family, so you should know the secret, at least,” his grandmother told him. “Your mother’s side of the family has certain gifts, mostly dealing with magic in some way. You aren’t to ever speak of it outside of our Family, you understand? It’s not something anyone else needs to know, and it’s a danger if it ever gets out.”

Stiles stared at his grandmother, and she spoke a word and a small fire started with the bundle of sticks. He felt it though, a strange electricity in the air, and he gasped as it crawled around his body. 

“You felt it?” his grandmother asked.

“Yeah,” Stiles whispered, awed. 

“Maybe it’s just not your time yet,” she wondered. “Most of the others have learned that it is there by now, though. If you ever feel yourself doing it, you need to pull back, out of the situation as soon as possible. Do you understand? It’s dangerous, and if you are caught by the wrong people they might kill you. There are Hunters against our kind, and they will not hesitate to kill you and then find the rest of our family. You must be careful.”

Stiles nodded. He wasn’t exactly sure that he was up for keeping a secret, but he understood what it was like to have someone in his family die, and he didn’t want to be the cause of that.

He and his grandmother walked back to the Family Castle, and the rest of his family stopped hiding their powers from him for the rest of the summer. It felt good, to have the magic that close to him, it felt like a warm blanket against his skin, and he loved the feeling. He wished he knew how to do something that awesome.


	2. Eighth Grade

Eighth grade dawned much like seventh grade, and if not for the fact that their lockers are now on the other side of the school Stiles was pretty sure that it was the exact same year on repeat. 

He had a lot more to think about this year than last, one of which is that his entire family is made out of characters from Harry Potter. Not cool like them, more lame like all family members are lame, but magic none the less. It made him watch Laura and Lydia more, wondering if anyone else ever had secrets like he had to keep.

Lydia obviously did not, her family was mundane and her parents were always fighting and her older sister went to college and Lydia’s pretty dang certain that the girl will never ever come back to Beacon Hills. 

Laura’s family, on the other hand, made Stiles pretty sure that something not exactly kosher was going on. For one, every single one of them looked like a supermodel. Derek actually growled once when Stiles came over, and he was relatively certain that most humans didn’t ever growl. Even Derek’s friends didn’t growl, and they were stereotypical jocks to the nth degree. Their combined knowledge could have written a book on the subject of Jockness and General Assholery, and it would have been an instant best-seller and reference material for the jock population at large. 

Except for the fact that Derek was painfully beautiful, and he didn’t ever make fun of Stiles. He didn’t acknowledge Stiles either, but one day he could, and Stiles held out hope for that day. Even though Derek made his heart speed and his palms sweat and made his body all kinds of uncomfortable, Stiles thrilled every single time his green and blue and gold gaze fell on him.

Knowing what Stiles knew though, that magic was real and that it happened to real people, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Hales were a pack of werewolves. 

Sure, it took him realizing that the only days he wasn’t allowed to hang out at Laura’s house coincided with the full moon, and that both Hale children were instructed to keep their tempers under control at all times, and that their baby sister would fuss if anyone she didn’t know came near her until she could bury her face in her family’s or Stiles’s necks, but Stiles thought that he could have figured it out if going by the sheer amount of food they consumed every day. It was either that or gamma radiation, and despite Stiles’s desperate hope that Marvel was in fact a history and not a comic book series, he had pretty much figured out by the time he was five that The Hulk was not going to smash through his boring day in elementary school.

Confronting Laura with that knowledge though, about werewolves, not The Hulk, was harder done than said. He figured he would take his grandmother’s round-about way of confronting the problem.

“So,” Stiles said, when Lydia had gone to her weekly family counseling session after school, leaving Stiles and Laura alone for the first time in a while, “Is there anything weird you want to tell me about yourself?”

“What?” Laura asked. Her gaze narrowed in his direction, although he knew she thought he was just being weird.

“Like, is there something you just feel you can’t tell anyone else?” Stiles knew he was about to start rambling, so he let himself just do that, “Like… a secret that you should tell your best friend, which of course I am, and something that I might have already figured out, but that if you don’t want to tell me it’s cool even though I already know…”

“Stiles, what are you asking?” Laura asked.

“Sometimes… sometimes families have secrets, and they can’t tell anyone outside of the family, unless of course, I think, another family might have a secret that’s comparable to the one that you’re trying to keep a secret, and if I’m wrong then I’m going to feel like a complete fool, but I’m pretty sure that I’m not because it’s not like being differently inclined is…”

“Stiles, quit babbling and get to the point,” Laura looked upset at this point, and it bothered Stiles, but not enough to make him stop.

“My grandmother is so much better at this than I am,” Stiles sighed, throwing himself back on her bed. “Laura, does the full moon make you turn furry?”

Apparently, bluntness on the investigation into the possible lycanthropic nature of one’s best friend was not the best route to take. Laura tackled him onto the bed, growling. Her eyebrows disappeared as the canines in her mouth grew, her eyes glowing a pale blue. “How did you find out? Are you a hunter?”

“Dude, where did your eyebrows go?” Stiles asked, “There are werewolf hunters? Your eyes are so fucking badass…”

Laura’s mom came into her bedroom then, looking startled at the sight of her daughter crouching over a prone Stiles in full werewolf glory. “Laura!” she said, and her eyes went bright red, like a laser pointer. 

“This is so awesome!” Stiles couldn’t help himself from exclaiming. 

Laura’s mom looked more startled at Stiles than she did at her own daughter, but then she walked forward and pulled Laura off of Stiles. “You know Laura, we keep this whole thing a secret for a reason,” Talia said somewhat dryly. 

“It’s not her fault,” Stiles was always quick to defend his best friend, “I figured it out myself.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but no one has ever figured it out,” Talia said, holding Laura back until she calmed and shifted back to being human, “So pardon me if I doubt that you’re telling the truth.”

“It’s not that hard to figure out,” Stiles said, “I mean, I’ve been around you for a whole year, so I kind of wonder how I didn’t figure it out beforehand.”

Talia gave Laura a look. “Are you sure you didn’t tell him?”

“I promise mom, I didn’t tell him anything,” Laura said.

“So…” Stiles said after an uncomfortable moment of Laura and Talia staring at each other, “What kind of hunters?”

Apparently, werewolf hunters were on the list of no-good, very-bad things that werewolves had to avoid. Stiles found out as much as he could about them, because boogey-men for werewolves was a fascinating concept and he suspected that humans being able to hunt supernatural creatures had to have some sort of magic, and maybe if they did he could use their methods to use his own magic. Nothing doing though, because there wasn’t a lot of evidence in the Hale library that indicated that any hunter had ever used magic. 

It was a day in late September that the Hale attitude towards Stiles changed considerably. There had been a strange wolf in the vicinity that had taken out a jogger next to the national forest next to the Hale property, and Stiles had gone with Laura to investigate it. He met his dad out there, who was also investigating because that was apparently part of his job as Sheriff, and Stiles quickly explained the entire situation away with a few hints towards mountain lions. If he had known that the adult Hales were in the woods listening in while he talked, he maybe would have tried to be a lot more subtle about telling his dad how he was researching mountain lions and possibly tried to make himself look a little less geeky. He didn’t want them telling Derek how much time he spent reading, because only nerds read and Stiles really, really didn’t want Derek to think of him as a nerd. Even though he sort of was. 

In any case, they stopped putting restrictions on Laura’s and Stiles’s relationship. Stiles even spent the night with Laura a few times, and he was invited along on full moon nights so that he could help out by watching Isaac and Tabby, who were the youngest Hales and not big enough to shift yet. It let all the adults shift together so that they could run through the woods, and they always seemed especially pleased afterwards to find Stiles watching the house while they were vulnerable. 

In late November, while Stiles was microwaving his traditional holiday TV tray, Laura invited him over after finding out he was alone. Uncle Peter picked him up, and for the first time Derek made eye contact with him. Stiles tried to control himself, but he was so excited that there was a possibility that Derek was aware of his existence that he might have gotten a little more flaily and spastic. 

He knew that Laura’s parents noticed how he was acting, and even Uncle Peter gave him a certain kind of smile at that, but all it did was make Stiles blush. Fortunately, none of the kids noticed at all, and Stiles was left to his uncomfortable emotions by himself. 

Stiles let himself talk to Laura about his family being magic, and how he himself was not even though he could feel it. He didn’t tell her about any other part of his trips to Poland, but he could tell by the expression on her face that she knew there was more to it. 

The AP classes were time consuming, and Stiles liked them because of how often the other kids got together to study. He was always over at someone’s house, always spending the night somewhere, sometimes even at some of the high school kids’ houses, and Stiles liked keeping his mind occupied.

During that time, Jackson Whittemore was a complete ass to Stiles. He didn’t mind too much, but in February he embarrassed him in front of Derek, and Stiles was mortified. He called Stiles a fag after gym class, and one of the boys that Stiles had never noticed before, a little kid named Scott McCall, took such offense to it that he actually took a swing at Jackson.

The fight didn’t last long and it didn’t end in Scott’s favor, but Stiles finally had a friend of the male persuasion and that made everything better. Scott was a great friend, and Stiles didn’t have only Laura and Lydia to hang out with anymore, which was kind of nice because Lydia was starting to get possessive of hers and Laura’s time together. She acted like she was jealous of the time that Stiles spent with Laura, but Stiles could have told her that there was nothing going on with Laura because she wasn’t even his type.

Eighth grade ended with a whimper, quickly with lots of preparation for high school and end of the year testing. Stiles was done with almost all of his ninth grade freshman credits, and he and Laura and Lydia were the only three in their class that had passed the end of the year course exams that excused them from retaking the classes in high school. They were technically sophomores in high school then, but they weren’t called that for some reason that Stiles didn’t really understand. 

Stiles was looking forward to spending the summer with his grandmother, who greeted him at the airport in Warsaw with candy and a large sign written in English. Some of his cousins were there to greet him too, and they drove back to the old castle with lots of chatter about what everyone had done that year. Stiles kept quiet about the fact that his best friend was a werewolf, because it wasn’t his secret to tell.

His grandmother started giving him books to read, things about spells and supernatural creatures and old Jewish folklore. He asked about hunters, wondering if the ones that hunted werewolves were the same kind that hunted people like Stiles’s family, and he was pointed in the direction of the family library, along one of the walls where there were hundreds of books written on the subject. 

Stiles read so much that summer that he barely even noticed its passing. It was almost time for him to go back to America when one of his cousins suggested a trip to the city to buy him some clothing for school. 

Stiles was pretty excited about going to Warsaw again, eager to do a little sight-seeing. He and his cousin shopped in some of the malls there, but they accidentally got separated when his cousin was looking at some books and Stiles had wandered off looking for some coffee. 

He was outside the mall, in an alley-way, when he saw a little boy running past him. The boy was in torn clothing, and there was blood streaming from his nose. 

“Hey,” Stiles called out in Polish, “You okay little man?”

The little boy looked at him with glowing yellow eyes, and Stiles sucked in a breath. He knew that this kid was a werewolf, and that he was in danger. 

“What’s going on? Do you need help?”

The little boy was crying, “The hunters are after me,” he sounded terrified, and Stiles knew that the kid had to have been terrified because it wasn’t like werewolves were the most open people he had ever met. Stiles looked up to see a whole group of men surrounding them, and he pushed the kid behind him.

“Step away,” a man dressed in all black said in Polish, “You don’t know what that kid is.”

“Actually, I do,” Stiles answered in Polish, “he’s a fucking kid.”

“Fucking American,” the guy spat. Stiles wondered how he knew, because his Polish accent was perfect. In the long run, he supposed it didn’t matter all that much. “That’s not a kid. Step away before he hurts you.”

“No,” Stiles said, his heart beating in his chest so loudly that it was kind of painful. He could feel something else though, something like electricity. He could feel his mother’s voice in his mind, saying words in Polish about being brave. This kid reminded him so much of Derek it wasn’t like he was going to step away. “You need to back the fuck off.”

Suddenly there were a lot of guns pointed at Stiles. “This is your last warning,” the man said. 

Stiles wasn’t having any of it, “Go away now before I hurt you,” he said, and his voice sounded loud and echo-y in his ears. The kid behind him whined, and it was such an animalistic sound that the adrenaline pumping through Stiles’s veins surged and Stiles could feel himself shaking. His mother’s voice was stronger in his mind, and the light around him was bending, distorting the faces of the men in front of him. 

He could see their fingers squeezing on the triggers of their guns in response to their warning, and time slowed down as a few bullets were shot and disintegrated in the air as they flew towards Stiles and the boy.

“What the fuck?” one of the men said, before all of the men were dropping their guns, screaming as the skin on their hands started blistering.

“Run!” Stiles said, panicking and he knew he tried to warn them, he knew it was him doing this, he knew it was his magic, but it was too late. He couldn’t make it stop. Their clothing caught fire, and the men were screaming as wind rushed through the alley-way, the bodies of the men turning to ash and snowing down on Stiles and the boy in gritty white flakes.

Stiles’s skin felt like it was burning around his shoulder blade, and he screamed out because he thought that his magic was burning his own skin, as the little wolf boy behind him shouted and whimpered, and the light around Stiles started dimming, narrowing, until the last thing Stiles saw was the face of his cousin leaning down over him, mouth moving like he was shouting at Stiles, eyes wide and panicked. 

Stiles knew nothing for a very long time. 

The first time he opened his eyes, his grandmother was talking on the phone next to him, looking concerned. Stiles passed out again.

The second time he opened his eyes, Uncle Peter was looking over his bed, concerned and his hand was on Stiles’s chest, his arm turning black.

“Nice place you have here, Stiles,” Peter said with a grin, and Stiles tried to smile back at him. He really did.

Stiles passed out again.

He woke up again in a car, and Peter kept him awake as they passed through airport security. He kept whispering things to him, not caring if Stiles understood or even responded, and Stiles leaned heavily on him as they went through customs. No one looked at them strangely, even though Stiles rallied himself to speak Polish long enough to expedite the situation. He quickly fell back asleep on the plane.

They had a layover in some city, two hours where Stiles was awake enough to listen to Peter explain how magical scarring occured, how it looked like tattoos on his body. Peter told Stiles he was proud of him for taking care of that child, how the child was going to live with a nice wolf pack in Poland, how the child had run to Stiles because Stiles still smelled like Pack even though he had been away for two months. Peter told Stiles that his dad was now officially Pack, and that they were part of the Hales now, forever. 

Stiles fell asleep on their last plane, and this time he didn’t wake up until he was in Derek’s arms. Derek carried him into the Hale house, and he tried so hard to not look at him in the eyes because he was too vulnerable now to let Derek see him, he knew his secrets would be written all over his face. He thought he whispered something to Derek, thought maybe Derek had whispered something back, but he couldn’t tell.

Stiles tried not to be embarrassed when he was explaining what had happened to Talia, but Derek scoffing at what Stiles had accomplished hurt like Hell. It wasn’t until Talia had made Stiles take his shirt off, how he explained some of it worked, how Derek stared so carefully at his magic scars, how Stiles had taken out eighteen hunters by himself that Derek was looking at him differently, with something between horror and respect. He looked like he actually wanted to touch Stiles, to take away his pain, but Derek’s mother growled at him to stay away from Stiles. She was probably protecting him from whatever stench Stiles was putting off towards her son.

Stiles was embarrassed, but he felt relieved to finally tell the truth to the Hales. He knew they would feel safer knowing this secret about Stiles, that it would make them be more open with things dealing with the Pack around him, that they would see him as an ally instead of just a Laura accessory. 

When he and Laura were alone that night, he finally saw the magical scars on his back. “Great,” Stiles said, “Like the other kids don’t already treat me like I’m a freak.”

“Don’t worry,” Laura told him. She looked like she wanted to hug him, but her mother had forbidden any of the children from even touching Stiles until some of his pain went away. “You’re Pack, Derek and I will look out for you.”

“Derek hates me,” Stiles complained.

“It doesn’t matter,” Laura declared, not knowing how it broke Stiles’s heart to hear that, “You’re Pack now. Derek knows what that means.”

Unfortunately, Stiles wasn’t really sure what it did mean, or if it would change Derek’s attitude towards him, or if it meant that one day Derek might really see him and like what he saw. Stiles decided not to carry too much hope toward that end.

It was hard though, because for the rest of the summer Derek never strayed too far away from Stiles. He was the one who eventually took over the Super Special Werewolf Pain Treatments, pulling Stiles’s pain into himself slowly. When Derek put his hands all over Stiles that summer, Stiles bit his lip so hard in order to control his reaction to it, to keep his frustration all on himself. It was the hardest thing he had ever done because Derek had really nice hands.


	3. Ninth Grade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of explanation as to how Stiles's magic actually works. Not so much on why his is so different, but it will give you kind of an idea as to how he does what he does with the rest of his life (assuming you've read the other story in this series).
> 
> Once again, this is just an academic knowledge of what Mysticism entails, I cannot perform nor have I knowingly met anyone who can actually do it. Most of the knowledge I have comes from conversations with academics and reading ridiculous amounts of books dealing with Mysticism. 
> 
> Hope it's not too boring for y'all!

Freshman year was more or less a swift swirly in a toilet bowl filled with puss from Satan’s syphilic penis. It was as if every single Senior had taken a single look at Stiles and had decided the short brainy kid needed putting in his place.

Stiles daydreamed quite often of revenge. He knew he could never do anything, knew part of it was that the prettiest girls in the Freshman class were his best friends and they simply weren’t as impressed with the Seniors as the Seniors felt they should have been, but it didn’t stop Stiles from imagining terrible fates on them every time it happened. It was one thing to know that Stiles could quite literally incinerate the entire Senior class, but justifying that against the possibility hunters could come in and take out his Pack and his Family because he broke the rules made keeping his powers a secret no contest. That and his grandmother had called him before school started to press the issue of keeping their secret an actual secret and that he wasn’t allowed to even experiment before they found out what was going on with him, despite the fact that his Pack now knew about it. He supposed that it was possible he should feel some sort of remorse for fantasizing about killing a couple asshole kids, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it after getting made fun of and hit and pushed and kicked and given literal swirlies. 

On the bright side, Derek, Danny, Boyd, and even Jackson formed kind of an honor guard around Stiles during passing periods by the middle of September. Stiles kept quiet about it, like acknowledging what they were doing would somehow make them stop. 

One day though, it got really bad.

Stiles stepped outside of his English class to find that Derek wasn’t waiting for him like he normally was. The Senior boys immediately noticed so they walked over and started giving him shit. 

Stiles ignored it and forced himself to hold his back straight, pretending he couldn’t hear them calling him names and then they started shoving him. 

It wasn’t until after one of them had punched him in the face that Derek showed up, with Jackson and Boyd and Danny not far behind them. By that time it was an all-out brawl, and the only teacher in the hallway wasn’t much bigger than Stiles herself. Stiles vaguely noticed that she ran into a classroom to hit an intercom button, but by that time one of the Seniors had picked Stiles up and slammed him into a wall. 

Derek pulled Stiles away from the Senior, who simply picked both the boys up and defenestrated them through the huge picture window in the front lobby of the high school. Stiles could feel the glass breaking all around them, but none of it went into his skin until he skidded on it and the concrete, ending up on top of Derek who quickly put his hands all over Stiles and jerked his shirt up to make sure that he was okay. Stiles heard him growl when he saw little chunks of glass embedded in his skin, Derek’s eyes glowing blue before he jumped back through the shattered window and took out three of the Senior boys before Laura got there to hold her brother back. 

It took everything Stiles had to not fight back with his magic when he saw the Seniors all ganging up on Derek, helped a little by the fact that he was lying in a pool of his own blood. He hated every fist and forearm that landed on Derek, he winced every single time a foot or a shin made contact with Derek’s legs and stomach. Stiles worked so hard at not incinerating the Senior boys that by the time Laura pulled Derek off of them, he passed out. The nurse just assumed that it was from seeing his own blood, and Stiles did nothing to disabuse her of that notion.

Stiles’s dad took some of the older boys in for assaulting underage children, and he was pretty sure it was simply procedure. His dad agreed not to press charges after speaking with some of their parents, as long as they understood that a second time would not be tolerated. Stiles was grateful, because he didn’t think it would go over well with the rest of the Senior class that the Sheriff’s son got some of them locked up. 

Stiles and Laura went out that year for Halloween to one of their classmate’s parties. The Reyes family was large and most of them didn’t even speak English, but Erica translated for them and they prepared for Day of the Dead with the rest of them. Erica was startled that her grandmother kept calling Stiles a brujo, and Laura kept trying to keep the two of them separated, but it was mostly just awkward. Stiles gave up avoiding her towards the end of the night, and he called her abuela and practiced his shitty Freshman Spanish with her, much to her delight. She gave him gifts, simple things made from popsicle sticks and yarn that she called Ojo de Dios, and an old rosary that she had brought with her from Mexico City. She kissed his hands before they left, which made Erica and Laura and Lydia look at him strangely, but he blushed and didn’t want to talk about it. Laura made sure that he didn’t have to, and it made him grateful to her.

The next week, Erica asked him out on a date. Stiles pretended that he misunderstood, told her that he was pretty busy taking care of his dad and their house, but he didn’t have to make a lot of excuses for Erica to back off. He was really grateful for that, and Erica started becoming one of his better friends, and the first person he ever talked to about Derek. 

That Christmas, Stiles talked to Mrs. Hale about cooking. It wasn’t that she was a horrible cook, he tried to reassure her, it was just that his mother had taught him some recipes that he really wanted to be able to cook for everyone else. Fortunately, it didn’t take much more to get his way than to drag his dead mother into it, and Mrs. Hale let him have access to the amazing kitchen that Stiles had always admired.

When Stiles’s mother had come to America, she had taken a scholarship to a University in the South. One of her cousins lived in Memphis, and she had been taught how to cook there. So Stiles pulled out his knowledge of Southern cuisine and threw together a feast. Dirty potatoes with sour cream, almond and honey carrots, cornbread with Monterrey Jack cheese, brown sugar yams, deep fried turkey, honey ham, five cheese macaroni, fried okra, sourdough biscuits with jalapeno jelly and cream cheese, and apple pie with vanilla ice cream, all made from scratch, were demolished by his dad and the Hale clan. Stiles was nominated as head chef for holiday meals by Derek even, and that put him in such a good mood he didn’t come down from it until February. 

The rest of ninth grade passed in a blur. Derek and his friends kept growing, and Stiles was still tiny like a little kid. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Derek and his new body, strong and tall and smooth with new muscles, even though Derek seemed to have forgotten about Stiles’s existence altogether. Stiles tried not to let himself get depressed about it, because he knew that he was really Laura’s friend and Derek just was polite to him because he was Pack. There was no reason for Derek to actually like Stiles at all.

It was that summer that Stiles really started studying magic, though.

It wasn’t actually magic, as his Babcia explained. It was the old ways, the start of the Kabbalah, that Stiles was going to concentrate on. Normally, in Jewish families, the oldest male child would be the only one to study, and only after his fortieth birthday, but they had decided that it would be better for Stiles to start earlier. His display the summer before had prompted the early start, because control was more important than secrecy.

“The spoken word,” Stiles’s Uncle Aaron started by explaining, “Is the most powerful thing in this universe. What are the first four words of Torah?”

“Bera berashit elohim et,” Stiles recited from memory.

“What is the translation in English? Literally translated, not the King James mockery,” Uncle Aaron prompted.

“In the beginning created G-d her,” Stiles recited again.

“You have forgotten a very important part of the first four words,” Uncle Aaron said. He didn’t sound disappointed, more like this lesson was taught over and over again to him in the exact same way.

Stiles pictured the Hebrew writing in the Torah, and then he remembered something that he had always found as strange. “Before the words, there is an aleph in the writings,” he said slowly, because he could never figure out if it was significant or not.

“Correct, and that aleph is silent, is it not?” Uncle Aaron said. “Why do you think that the scribes would have put that letter in there if it serves no purpose?”

Stiles understood the tradition of copying Torah. Each page would be copied exactly the same, and then checked by Rabbis to make sure that it had retained holiness. Each letter would be counted, to ensure that it was used exactly the same number of times. Each letter would be inspected, to ensure that they had been copied perfectly. If even a single mistake was made in the copy, it would be burned to ensure that it would not taint the Torah in any way. “The silence could signify the nothing before YHVH created the universe,” Stiles ventured.

“Very good,” Uncle Aaron prodded. “What shattered that silence?”

“The spoken word,” Stiles answered, feeling surer of himself.

“God shattered the silence with Creation, a female verb in Hebrew,” Uncle Aaron said. “It is through this that we know how powerful the spoken word is. Is the spoken word a territory of females then, or is creation itself the territory of females?” Uncle Aaron seemed to ask the last question as if it were something that he thought about himself, instead of part of the lesson.

“If the spoken word is so powerful, why is it that every time I talk the world remains the same?” Stiles asked.

“What if you simply do not pronounce your words correctly? What is the correct pronunciation of G-d’s name?” Uncle Aaron asked.

Stiles thought for a moment, “No one knows how to say His Name,” he stated.

“If one ever did state His Name, could the world become unmade?” Uncle Aaron asked. “The Christians have a verse, ‘Man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from G-d.’ Do you think that they might have another understanding of the first four words of Torah that we had not formed into an idea yet?”

“All of Creation comes from the spoken word of G-d. Creation includes the wheat our bread comes from, therefore bread comes from the spoken word of G-d,” Stiles said slowly. “We cannot eat unless G-d speaks.”

“So, the study of Kabbalah, in part, is the study of the proper pronunciation of words, if we were to oversimplify things. This is why your grandmother wanted you to speak the word for fire. It did not work for you that way. What prompted you to use your ability, as the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, last summer? You must be honest with yourself, if not me, for that is where your power lies.”

Stiles thought. It was the werewolf child, who had reminded Stiles so much of Derek, and the possibility that one day Derek might be in danger. Stiles had to make sure that he never let that happen. “Love,” Stiles said. “A need to protect, an outrage for the injustice shown to a child, a knowledge that, deep down, I could prevent a wrong.”

Uncle Aaron sat down with Stiles. He was silent for a long time. “Your mother said that she was visited by Saraquiel before you were born.”

“The Angel of Death?” Stiles whispered. He knew his book of Enoch, for all it was not considered Torah.

“Saraquiel told your mother that you would bring change. It has worried many of the other rabbis. They have all insisted that you study here, in Poland, or go to Israel and immediately start rabbinical school there. They worry that you will upset the balance, nephew.”

Stiles didn’t know what to say, but they were interrupted by one of his cousins, and Uncle Aaron instructed Stiles to start meditating on the pronunciation of G-d’s name: YHVH in all its mystic elements. Stiles did what most rabbis did, and started combining the vowels in order after every consonant. 

Each verse of Torah had to be studied, scrutinized, down to the last letter. Each letter had to be translated into numbers, studied. Each verse had to be categorized, compared to the leaders of the Jewish faith, placed in appropriate position on the Tree of Life, studied to understand the 10 Sephirot, compared to each and every other verse to know the true meaning, translated into three different languages to ensure proper understanding. The work was hard and time-consuming, but his Uncle Aaron taught him as best he could with the help of lots of visiting rabbis. 

It wasn’t the only scrutiny he had been given that summer. Most of the priests were shocked that his magical scars were actually words, and in Polish, not Hebrew. They muttered every time they instructed Stiles to take off his shirt, and then insisted that he change into shorts so that they could see the progression of scars as they burned into the skin of his body. Stiles hated the scrutiny, hated being poked and prodded, but he bore it with silence. Laura and Lydia would probably die of shock if they knew how quiet he was in Poland. 

There were more lessons in Torah, more instructions on how to perform certain ceremonies, more strange treatment from family and rabbis, more conjecture about how he was different: his magic came too quickly, how he was more powerful than any of the family had been, possibly more powerful than any of the mystics, except for of course Moses and Aaron, the founders of the religion, (his uncle’s namesake not his uncle himself). There were letters written to Israel, letters written to Southwestern Russia, letters to Berlin and London, letters written to Brooklyn and Memphis and Los Angeles and Tampa. There were replies from rabbis, and once even a reply from an old tzadik, one of the 36 who were alive in the world (not that this number was distressing, there were 36 tzadik and there would always be 36 tzadik, as when one died another was born immediately), who told the rabbis to shut up and let Stiles be a boy, as that was what his primary job should be in the world at that point; after all, even the Christians let their Messiah (oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son) be a boy before they started recording his miracles. Of course, for all his affinity with G-d, the tzadik was ignored, as they were so often were; a man having the presence of YHVH tended to make one uncomfortable in the presence of politics.

Stiles was invited to many different places, many different countries to come and study with mystics and rabbis. His Babcia wrote polite refusals for him, not even consulting Stiles before she made her decision. They were welcome to come to her home to visit him, but there was no reason for Stiles to be beyond the protection her home afforded him. She did not mention that he lived in America during the school year, or that he was an American at all. Stiles was grateful for this, because he knew that he would never find relief if any of these holy men found out that little tidbit of information.

Stiles was under no illusion that his incident the previous summer had escaped notice, nor was he naïve enough to think that his progression with magic had been unremarkable. He had seen so many rabbis that summer, so many from all of the forms of Judaism, that he felt strange seeing people who weren’t wearing prayer shawls or boxes on their foreheads or long black robes or the ever present kippah or yarmulke. They all donned formal dress robes to meet and speak with Stiles, and his Babcia had let them stay at her castle and afforded them all the graces that hospitality had required. 

He returned to Beacon Hills with relief. There, no one treated him like a freak of nature, no one thought that his presence was a sign of the end of times or a promise of Messiah. It was in Beacon Hills that he was safe, protected by wolves and his father who knew nothing of what Stiles had to learn over the summer. 

Laura came over as soon as Stiles got home. He was shocked to find that he was significantly taller than she was, and when she hugged him she felt tiny in his arms. When he had left for Poland that summer, he had only reached her chin, but now he was almost half a foot taller than she was. She teased him about his growth spurt, which he had completely not noticed at all what with the studying and scrutiny from the community. She mentioned that his scent had changed, but he promised her it had more to do with all the Polish foods he had been eating than anything else. He knew of course, that it was simply the new magic he had been learning, but he wanted to pretend, just for a while, that he wasn’t a freak. 

After Laura left, Lydia came over, wrapping him in her perfume scented arms. It wasn’t that Laura was stinky, it was just that Lydia always smelled like flowers to him. He loved the way that she gushed over how good-looking he had become, how adorable and tall. He knew it was shallow, but he wanted to be praised for something other than his magic, and he would take all of the silly compliments he could get. He would need to shore them up, because being around Derek again that year after being made to feel like such a freak all summer would probably hurt him more than anything else had.


	4. Tenth Grade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm only halfway through the next chapter, but I'm hoping you'll be patient and enjoy this extra-long chapter in return for my extremely long and detailed chapter next. I think there's going to be smut next time... if you hadn't already figured that out, so I'm going to have to actually give this story a rating. Thinking about what it's going to be is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

“Stiles,” Scott said in a strangely somber tone, “there’s something you need to know before school starts.”

Stiles looked up at his only male friend. “Okay,” he felt kind of nervous. 

“Derek’s got a girlfriend,” Scott whispered really quickly, like saying it like that would lessen the impact.

Scott had found out about Stiles’s epic crush on Derek Hale after hanging out with Erica one day, and he had sworn secrecy by actually spitting on his palm and holding it out for Stiles to shake. That memory alone was enough to prevent Stiles from crying in homeroom. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Scott said. “She lives down the street from Jackson. They’re a rich family that moved in while you were gone this summer. She’s a Senior this year.”

Stiles swallowed deep, and took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, because what else was he supposed to say? 

“I’m sorry, man,” Scott said, patting Stiles on the shoulder. Stiles knew if they weren’t in the middle of homeroom, Scott would have pulled him into a hug, because Scott was just affectionate that way. It didn’t make him feel any better, but at least Scott was by his side as Stiles walked to his first period class.

He knew that it would happen one day, that Derek would start dating and other people would see how absolutely amazing he was. He should have prepared himself, should have figured out that Derek wasn’t ever going to look at Stiles the same way that Stiles looked at Derek. Stiles felt kind of stupid for not realizing it before, that everything that he imagined about the two of them was simply that: imaginary. 

A girlfriend though, it kind of finalized things. 

Stiles threw himself into track and field, studied everything that he could in order to hide from his breaking heart. He took a couple of on-line courses so that he could graduate early, and ignored his Babcia’s invitation to finish high school in Poland with his cousins. He couldn’t leave his dad like that at this point anyway, no matter what. 

One day after school, after he had changed into his track and field uniform (modified to hide the tattoos, as per the coach’s instructions,) Stiles was walking down the hall to the nearest water fountain when he saw Derek staring at him.

Derek’s eyes were wide, like he had seen a ghost. Stiles was worried that something was going on, and he looked around him quickly before glancing back at Derek, whose eyes were definitely making a slow trek back up Stiles’s body. Stiles couldn’t help himself, he was smiling like a fool to have caught Derek checking him out. Maybe the girlfriend wasn’t as big of a deal as everyone else thought. 

“Hey Der’,” Stiles said, but Derek didn’t say anything back so Stiles kept walking, embarrassed to have greeted Derek in so public a setting, albeit was simply a deserted high school hallway. What if someone had seen him? He didn’t need everyone to know how far gone on Derek he had become.

Nothing else happened until after Stiles’s and Laura’s and Derek’s birthday, and Stiles had gotten settled into his routine of ignoring Derek Hale the best he could. Derek had walked in on Laura and Lydia and Stiles changing before a Student United Nations meeting, where Stiles’s team had finished their presentation on Djibouti and was about to do it in front of their classmates that night at a team meeting, to prepare themselves for a state competition. Lydia had gone out and bought their presentation outfits, and she had insisted that they all dress up for their run-through in the high school auditorium with the rest of the Student UN, to make sure that the clothing wouldn’t bother them while they were in Sacramento doing their presentation. 

Derek walked in while Stiles was pulling up his pants, and Stiles knew his face was flushed. 

“Laura, you can’t get naked with a guy in your room,” Derek said, glaring at Stiles.

“We’re not naked,” Stiles protested, but Derek Hale even saying the word ‘naked’ had him flushed and turning around, because God the thing that those two concepts alone did to his dick were embarrassing. 

He was so embarrassed that he didn’t hear anything about what Derek and Laura were yelling about, and by the time he had everything tucked away and his pants zipped up Derek was storming out of Laura’s bedroom. 

“Your brother is such a psycho,” Lydia told Laura. 

“I have no idea what’s wrong with him. Mom and dad must have dropped him on his head when he was still a baby,” Laura agreed. 

Stiles didn’t know what to say, so he simply ushered the girls out of Laura’s bedroom and packed them into Laura’s Camaro, so that they wouldn’t get dirty like Lydia claimed they would if they rode around in Stiles’s Jeep. 

During Christmas, Stiles showed Laura his early acceptance letter to a university in Poland near his grandmother’s castle. He still hadn’t told Laura exactly what was going on in the summer while he was there, and Laura never pressed for details because she was awesome like that. They spent most of Christmas dinner (another creation by Stiles Stilinski, chef extraordinaire) giggling about her coming to Poland to visit. Stiles promised her that she would always have a bed at his grandmother’s house, and that she was welcome at any time. He didn’t mention the room would probably be in a suite with a bathroom roughly the size of her bedroom in the Hale House, but he didn’t quite think that was necessary. 

Of course, the only class that Stiles would happen to have with Derek would be physical education. Stiles wasn’t completely hopeless as an athlete; he could run like no one’s business, but it wasn’t a good class to display his abilities to Derek in. Derek would never be impressed by Stiles getting hit in the head with a ball, or tripping over absolutely nothing, or anything, anything having to do with physical prowess. Especially when Derek had honest to goodness werewolf grace to fall on in every single sport that they played. 

Oh, it hurt to watch him in class. Derek was just so good at all of the games that they had to play, he made it look so easy that it had Stiles gnashing his teeth at him. Not that Derek noticed, because as far as Stiles could figure out Derek didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Stiles. At all. 

The worst part about gym class though, is that all of the boys want to touch Stiles’s skin. All the time. They constantly dragged their fingers over his tattoos, asking him questions about them and wanting to know why he would have gotten Polish written on his body. He bore through it the same way that he bared through letting the rabbis touch him in the summer, he let no emotion seep through his voice or his facial expressions when he explained what they say, but he did not tell them what they meant other than basic translations. Derek never touched him. 

Soon, the news of his tattoos got through to the girls in class, and they crowded around him during gym to ask him questions. A couple of them were not so subtly flirting with him, and he held back his astonishment and disgust when they moved his clothing for a peak at what they thought was ink on his skin. He didn’t treat their attention any differently from the boys in the locker room, so when he stepped out of the shower after class that day he was shocked to find Derek waiting for him.

“How does Laura feel about all those girls around you, Stilinski?” Derek asked.

“What?” Stiles asked him, and he shifted the towel around his hips tighter, wishing that he had at least dried off a little more so that he wouldn’t look like so much of a drowned rat when Derek finally deigned to talk to him for the first time since the summer before last.

“You’d better not be cheating on my sister,” Derek sounded like he was angry, and it took Stiles more than a few moments to catch on to what he was implying..

“Cheating on… what?” Stiles asked. “Dude, I’m… Laura and I aren’t…” Stiles wished he wasn’t stuttering, wished that he could say something witty and clever to impress Derek but the words just weren’t coming.

“You’d better make sure you take care of her, Stiles,” Derek growled at him.

“Derek,” Stiles tried to catch his attention, tried to let him know that he wasn’t interested in Laura, tried to call him back so that they could just talk, but his mouth wouldn’t move no matter how hard he was trying. “Derek, Laura and I…”

“Whatever,” Derek turned around and went back to his locker so that Stiles was left with nothing but empty air. Stiles dragged his feet back to his own locker, and by the time he left the locker room it was empty.

Thank God that his classes were tiny, because Laura found him in their second period class, biting his lip to keep from crying. She and Lydia quickly went and whispered something to the teacher, who let them all go to the girls’ bathroom together so that they could clean Stiles up.

Stiles told Laura about Derek confronting him in the locker room. Laura almost growled, she probably would have if Lydia hadn’t been there, and Lydia looked at Stiles just a little too long while Laura ranted about her brother being a freak. Lydia helped Stiles wash his face when Laura stalked off to find her brother, and Lydia whispered, “You like him, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, not lying, “Of course I like him, he’s my best friend’s twin…”

“Good try, Stiles,” Lydia rolled her eyes. “You can lie to yourself all you want, but I know better.”

“Don’t tell Laura?” Stiles whispered. “God, I don’t think I could handle if she knew.”

“I’m not one of those,” Lydia rolled her eyes. “Just because I know everything about you doesn’t mean that Laura does, too. I know the two of you have your secrets from me, so Laura can just deal with you and me having secrets from her.” 

Lydia sounded kind of jealous, so Stiles looked at her closely, too. “You like Laura.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “I have a plan, and I don’t need your input.”

Stiles found himself laughing as Lydia applied a little powder to his face to cover up the redness of his nose and cheeks and the darker circles under his eyes. She also drew a bit of eyeliner on his eyes, her eyes twinkling before she dragged both of them back to their class. Stiles didn’t care, he let her. Plus, all the other guys in his class got jealous when one of them had pointed out that Stiles was wearing Lydia’s eyeliner, so it worked out in the end. Laura wasn’t happy about it, but that only made Stiles laugh harder. Lydia put up no protest on the Making Laura Jealous Front, and she pretended that she didn’t even notice.

Stiles and the girls studied that spring like they never had before. They had signed up to take the SAT, because Stiles needed it for his early admittance into college and the girls wanted to get as much practice in taking the test as was possible. Late night study sessions turned into early morning, Mrs. Hale delivered food to Laura’s room like clockwork, and most nights Stiles fell asleep on Laura’s bed with Laura and Lydia on either side of him, their heads resting on his shoulders. 

He wished that he was attracted to one of them, because his life would have been so much easier then. As it was, he knew that it was hopeless in any respect.

The night before the test, they had all agreed to spend the night at Laura’s to do one last review for the math section of the test. They had done essay writing the night before, which was Stiles’s strong suit, and the English section the night before that, which was Laura’s strength, so Lydia was pulling them through math review and some teaching before they tackled the test the next day. 

Stiles had caught on faster than Laura in math, so he simply did some practice exercises that Lydia had designed while Lydia went over some steps with Laura again on problem solving. He was twitchy and energetic though, like he had to go do something, and he stepped out of the room and started wandering the Hale House, something that he didn’t do very often.

It was quiet, and when he checked his phone he realized that it was almost midnight and everyone was probably asleep by then, but he had to move so he walked as silently as he could through the halls. One of the doors was opened on the third floor, one that he had never seen open before, and light was shining from up the stairs. He figured it must have been the attic. 

He wondered who could possibly be up there at this time of night, even though it was a Friday night and he knew that there wasn’t any reason for anyone to be in the attic. He slowly climbed the stairs to find Derek sitting in a pile of canvases and sketch pads, an easel next to him holding beautiful colors of the sunset outside the Hale House, and Derek looking up at him silently.

Stiles knew that he could talk a blue streak, knew that was what he was known for, but words failed him. He had no idea what to say to Derek, even though they were completely alone for the first time. He knew what he wanted to say, knew he wanted to tell Derek to just look at him, just see him for who he was, just let Stiles show him how good they could be together, but Stiles couldn’t. 

Derek watched him move around his space for a while, and then he took a piece of charcoal and started drawing, glancing up at Stiles every once in a while.

Stiles moved around the attic, touched some of Derek’s drawings. It was probably the closest he would ever get to Derek, and it was like his silence was their safe zone. He noticed that Derek wrinkled up a drawing, scowling at it, but he was quick enough that he recognized his own face in it before it was destroyed.

Stiles sat down across the room from Derek and just held still. It was the best time of his life, being allowed to look at Derek Hale for as long as he wanted. Derek didn’t say anything at all, just kept sketching and glancing at Stiles, and he hoped that Derek couldn’t hear his heart pounding in his ears, couldn’t smell the affects that he had on Stiles’s body, so Stiles concentrated on thinking about anything other than how much he wanted Derek. 

They left the attic as the sun was rising, and Stiles waited on the girls to come down the stairs so they could take their test. 

Laura dropped him off at his own house after the test, and even though he had stayed up the entire night before with Derek he still couldn’t sleep. Derek hadn’t told him to leave, and he hadn’t thrown Stiles down the attic steps at all. He had spent literally hours with Stiles, and what did it matter that there hadn’t been a single word said? Obviously, Derek knew that they had a connection, just like Stiles did, and he probably pretty much had no idea what to do with that connection any more than Stiles did. 

Stiles bounced off the walls to his bedroom for a while, and then frantically jerked himself off trying to relieve some of the tension. God, he liked Derek Hale so much, and Derek had let them spend time together, and it was the absolute greatest thing in the world. Stiles imagined taking Derek to Poland with him, letting him play in Stiles’s castle, introducing Derek to all of Stiles’s relatives. Derek would get to see how important Stiles was, he would get to know all of Stiles’s secrets and he would be so impressed with him and it would be the greatest thing ever! They could get married and have little Stilinskis, or little Hales, he wasn’t sure which name they would go with. Maybe they could hyphenate. They would obviously have to adopt, because they lacked a uterus, but Stiles imagined his and Derek’s little Korean or Vietnamese babies, and he imagined going through customs as the proud new fathers of said babies.

It also meant that Stiles was going to have to be the breadwinner for their family. Derek would want to stay home and do his art, obviously, and Stiles was going to have to provide a decent home for them. He wondered what kind of job he should do, because although he was smart he just didn’t have a passion for anything yet. Definitely not a rabbi, as open minded as the Jewish faith was he didn’t think that they would let him be a rabbi with a husband. He would have to ask Babcia if that was possible first, before he wrote it off. He knew everyone kind of expected him to be a rabbi, what with his understanding and his abilities, but… he just didn’t feel the calling, and to be a religious leader he kind of felt that one needed to be called.

So what else could he do? He wanted to do something that would bring a lot of money in so that Derek would be comfortable, and could stay home with their kids. He wondered what they would name their children, if Derek had any traditional names that he wanted from the Hale family, and Stiles immediately knew that they were not naming any of their kids at all after the Stilinski side of the family, except for maybe his dad, although John was kind of a boring name. 

Stiles fell asleep between naming their first daughter Talia, after Mrs. Hale, and debating back and forth between Bruce and Tony for their first son. 

Stiles showed up at school on Monday excited. He and Derek were going to eat lunch together, and they were going to walk through the halls together, and maybe Stiles could hold Derek’s hand and kiss him by the end of the school day. 

Except Derek ignored him. Didn’t even look at him. Pretended that Stiles wasn’t even there, like they hadn’t even shared a moment the weekend before.

Stiles pretended nothing had happened. Laura and Lydia didn’t even notice, which was nice. Stiles held his head up high and carried on like it hadn’t even mattered to him, because he knew, deep down, that he had totally over-reacted.

“You know,” Lydia said, one day while they were out getting coffee with Scott, “I think that Derek likes you.”

“No,” Stiles protested. “He really, really doesn’t.”

“He looks at you all the time,” Scott said, staring at Allison Argent, who was sitting across the café from them with a book in her hand.

“Probably thinking of ways that he can rip my throat out with his teeth,” Stiles said miserably. 

“That was graphic,” Lydia stated, stirring some more sugar into her coffee. She always ordered it black, and then slowly added sugar into it like if she did it slow enough they wouldn’t notice.

“Well, most of my fantasies involving Derek are pretty damn graphic,” Stiles admitted.

“Dude,” Scott said, “That wasn’t necessary for me to know.”

“Your face isn’t necessary for me to know,” Stiles came back at him lamely. 

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, that was lovely.” Lydia turned to where Scott was staring forlornly, and yelled out, “Allison! Come over here and sit with us!”

“Lydia,” Scott hissed.

Stiles smirked into his coffee.

“One of us is going to have a happy relationship,” Lydia stated. “Hey, how are you?” she asked Allison sweetly as the brunette joined them at their table.

“Fine,” Allison smiled, and Stiles had to admit Scott had good taste as the girl’s dimple flashed in her cheek. “Just reading this book…”

“That’s a good book,” Scott said, and Stiles tried not to roll his eyes. Scott hadn’t even taken his eyes off of Allison’s face to read the title.

“It’s my favorite,” Allison smiled at Scott.

“Yeah, it’s a favorite of mine, too,” Scott replied inanely.

Lydia rolled her eyes again. “So Allison, we were talking about how much Derek Hale likes Stiles.”

Allison almost snorted her coffee out of her nose. “I know, right? God, so many girls I sit with at lunch totally ship it.”

“What?” Stiles asked.

Lydia smiled triumphantly at Stiles. “It’s the eye-fucking, isn’t it?” she asked Allison.

“So much eye-fucking,” Allison agreed. “And how much Derek avoids him every single time Stiles walks into a room.”

“What?” Stiles asked. “How does avoidance translate into… and what eye-fucking?”

“The way you look at him when he’s not watching, the way he basically takes your clothes off with his eyes when you’re not watching, it’s so hot,” Allison shrugs. 

“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Lydia said. “See Stiles, Derek likes you.”

“Derek what?” Laura sits down at the table with them after ordering a coffee.

“Um,” Stiles said, running a hand over his hair. “Nothing.”

“You’re Derek’s twin sister, aren’t you?” Allison asked.

“Yes. Now Derek likes who?” Laura asked.

“It’s nothing, Laura,” Stiles said, staring intently at his coffee.

“Stiles, Laura, Derek likes Stiles,” Scott said, for the first time in his life answering one of Laura’s questions. Stiles would have hit him, but it might have emasculated him in front of Allison. If only Allison knew how brave Scott was being right now, she would have been so impressed. Stiles still wanted to kill Scott for talking about it in front of Laura after keeping his secret for so long.

“Oh my God,” Stiles said, burying his face in his arms on the tabletop. 

“Derek. Does. Not. Like. Stiles,” Laura gritted out between clenched teeth. Stiles peeked up to see that Laura was almost shifting, her nails slowly starting to grow.

“Of course he doesn’t,” Stiles said, reaching out to take Laura’s hand. “Scott doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Derek is straight, right Lydia?” 

Lydia was confused, and kind of upset. “Are you jealous that your brother likes Stiles?” Lydia demanded. “If you wanted to be with Stiles, you should have said something.”

“I don’t want Stiles like that,” Laura said, “But my brother…”

“No,” Lydia said, pulling her purse off of her chair, “You say that you don’t want to be with Stiles, but your actions are saying something totally different. I don’t believe you,” and Lydia stomped out of the café.

Laura watched Lydia leave with a heartbroken look on her face, like she couldn’t believe that Lydia was actually walking out on her.

“Go,” Stiles said, pulling her away from Allison and Scott, who were looking at each other with bid eyes. “Explain things…”

“You know I can’t…” Laura started to say.

“No, I know you can’t to outsiders, but Lydia is not an outsider anymore,” Stiles glared at Laura. “Go explain, or she will never trust you as her friend again.”

Laura paused for only a few seconds before she ran out of the café after Lydia. 

Stiles turned back to Scott and Allison, who were staring at each other and blushing. Stiles walked back to them, “Oh look, my dad just called. I have to go,” he said with a smile at Scott, and then he left them alone. 

He went over to the Hales again that night. Mrs. Hale left him into the house, and she smiled when he made his way up to the attic.

Derek again didn’t say anything at all to him, but it was good for Stiles to study him in their silence. Derek draws, and he frowned at Stiles when he looked up at him, like he couldn’t figure something out. Stiles tried to evaluate what was going on, and although it seemed like he was there forever, Derek didn’t say anything before Stiles got up to leave again just a little while before the sun rose.

The last two weeks of Stiles’s sophomore year went by quickly. He had a lot of paperwork to fill out, and his scores hadn’t come back from the SAT yet. Still, he had to send some paperwork to the University in Poland, and he signed up for Polish classes at the local community college for after school that fall semester. His babcia had finalized some plans for him to study with a Cardinal at the Vatican that summer, and he had to call the American Embassy in Italy to complete his paperwork for him to study there for a month. His babcia had told his dad that it was a pleasure trip, but still it was a pain to be an unaccompanied minor trying to study a highly secretive practice and keep it a secret from almost every single person in the world. 

The last night before he was to leave, Stiles found himself walking up the steps to Derek’s attic again. There were so many things that he wanted to tell Derek, but he found every single time he opened his mouth to say something he just couldn’t. There were too many secrets that he had to keep, too many details that would take too long to explain, and Stiles just couldn’t make himself do a single thing. 

Finally, he said something. Unfortunately, it was, “My plane is leaving in three hours. I need to go home and pack.”

Derek nodded his head and stood up, and to Stiles’s shock he came over and wrapped his arms around him. Stiles tried not to squeak when Derek buried his nose into Stiles’s neck and inhaled deeply, like he was trying to keep the smell of him in his nose or something. Stiles pulled away, not able to make eye contact with Derek, because he didn’t trust himself to not just start talking. 

He didn’t spend too long in Poland, dodging Rabbis left and right and getting his International Driver’s License, before his babcia let him borrow a car to drive down to Italy. She offered the assistance of one of his cousins, but Stiles told her that he preferred to take the trip on his own. She laughed at him a little and then let him borrow the keys to her bright blue Bugatti Veyron, along with a map so that he could take the Autobahns in Germany. She was telling him that if he went too fast he would have to change the oil and replace the tires too quickly, and to try and keep it at 160 kph (which Stiles’s quickly calculated into 100 mph) so that the engine wouldn’t overheat. Stiles whimpered a little bit, because he knew that the car could go almost three or four times as fast as that, but he knew that she wasn’t kidding.

It was a joy to drive the car, the most fantastic thing in the world. He did take it to 150 mph because he couldn’t stop himself, but for the most part he kept the car at 100 mph like she had asked him to. 

Driving into the Vatican was like a different world, especially with all the lack of formality that Stiles had gotten used to in the United States. It seemed that everyone had a uniform, even the person who came to take his luggage and then park his car for him. He had to go through some very interesting introductions, which he had fortunately already had time to learn how to do correctly thanks to his Babcia, and he stayed in a suit every single day during his stay, which his Babcia had already ensured he knew how to dress in and how to make sure it was the appropriate degree of formal. 

He met two Cardinals, a lot of Arch-Bishops, and others who wanted to question him on why he was studying mysticism so early. He was granted access to some areas of the Vatican library for study, more so than the general public, in any case, and he knew that there was so much there he would never get to study it all. He was given a quick run-down into some Holy Relics, got to see (but not touch) some of the most sacred pieces of Christianity, and then study some into Christian Mysticism. 

None of the Cardinals were surprised at what he could do, although they did say he was the strongest child they had ever seen or even had read about in their history books. They thought it interesting that the Hebrew language was not necessary for him to use his magic, and they politely asked for demonstrations. He didn’t do anything big, of course, he called a light breeze for them and made it rain in one of their empty marble rooms, and in other ways demonstrated his power in small ways. The Cardinals especially seemed to want to know if he could do new things, and Stiles only had a few new magic tattoos by the time he was ready to tell them good-bye.

Honestly, most of the time Stiles spent in Italy was discussing ethics and morals, the meaning of God, the meaning of Stiles’s own purpose on the planet. The Cardinals jokingly tried to convert Stiles to Christianity a few times, and he would jokingly try and make them jealous that he was Jewish and they were not, and for the most part they got along. He had been worried a little that he would be judged for everything, but the Cardinals were warm and welcoming, more concerned about what he was going to do with his power on accident than what he would do with it on purpose. They seemed to think that he had a good head on his shoulders, although they told him they were honestly worried about a teenager with that much power, especially as teenagers were inherently illogical individuals who were impossible to predict. 

Stiles drove back to Warsaw with the Cardinal’s phone numbers and encouragements to stay in touch. He liked the old dudes, they had given him a lot to think about and he appreciated their candidness when giving him advice and their bluntness when asking him questions. They didn’t treat him like a Messiah, as so many of the rabbis were wont to do, and they carried no expectation of him other than to be a good person. It was a nice change of pace compared to the experience he had last summer.

Back in Poland, the rest of the summer was filled with lessons that gave Stiles barely enough time to sleep. He learned so much that his skin hurt, and he had taken to long baths filled with Vitamin E oil to soothe his skin. 

He wondered why he was being pushed so quickly through the coursework for a couple of days before he asked his Babcia about it. She simply told him that he learned more quickly than anyone else ever had, but if he wanted she would slow it down some. Stiles refused. He wasn’t particularly interested in slowing down because learning was fun, even if it was a bit painful. 

He got back on the plane for the United States at the end of summer, eager to be reunited with his friends and Derek. He couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen with Derek that year, and he bounced in his plane seat almost all the way to California with excitement.


	5. Eleventh Grade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stiles’s character is more markedly different in this chapter than in others. I think it’s true to the story though; because Stiles has a different best friend. In Teen Wolf, Stiles has Scott, who’s miraculous ability to accept people for exactly who they are, even if it isn’t socially normal or appealing, makes Stiles who he is: loud, brash, and sure of himself. In this story, Stiles has not had that complete acceptance of himself as a person; Laura is Stiles’s best friend, and she’s controlling and very goal oriented, leaving Stiles a little less sure of himself and a lot more quiet. Peers really help develop personality, especially during adolescence, and I hope that it doesn’t make you think that I just made Stiles whoever I wanted in order to tell a story. Neither Laura nor Scott is better or worse than they are, they’re just people. People have flaws, but it doesn’t make them evil, and it doesn’t mean that they have bad intentions at heart. Stiles will come more into his own later, but it’s going to take acceptance from someone he loves and respects (I wonder who that will be?).

Fuck Derek Hale. No, seriously, fuck Derek Hale. Stiles had it built into his mind, again, that Derek was into him. He wasn’t. No, he was into every single girl Beacon Hills High had to offer. And they were all talkers, every single one of them.

He had to hear about what an amazing kisser Derek was, how good he was with his hands, how he just instinctively knew where to move and what to touch. He had to hear about how he was absolutely amazing with his clothing off. He had to hear girls comparing and contrasting what an amazing boyfriend he was during the ten to fifteen day relationships he had with every single girl in the school. None of them were pissed when they broke up with him, and they all wanted to talk about what a good time they had when they had broken up with him. 

It was enough to make a sane man take a gun to them all.

So fuck Derek Hale, Stiles decided. He didn’t care anymore. He was officially over his massive Derek Hale crush. He wasn’t going to think about it anymore, at all, and he definitely wasn’t going to remember the five minute hug they shared in the attic the night before Stiles had left for Poland. 

Much. 

At all.

Whatever. Derek Hale was a douchnozzle, and Stiles hated him. A lot. A lot a lot. More than anyone else on the planet. Well, except for that Stiles didn’t hate him. He wouldn’t give Derek Hale his hate, because that would indicate that Stiles cared about Derek Hale. And Stiles definitely didn’t. Care, that is. Because obviously he didn’t. 

“We could always kill him,” Scott suggested helpfully, glaring at Derek across from them in the cafeteria.

“Kill who?” Laura asked. 

“No one,” Erica said quickly. “Let’s go to the beach tomorrow. Have a cook-out and play some volleyball.

“Ew, sand,” Lydia said.

“That sounds like fun,” Scott said. 

“I want to go, too,” Allison said, smiling into Scott’s eyes.

“Do we have time? We don’t have any big assignments next week, do we?” Laura asked.

“Not until Thursday,” Lydia said practically. 

“I’m mostly done with it, too,” Stiles agreed. “I just have some reading to do…”

“Then let’s go,” Laura decided for the group. “It will be good to have a stress-killer, and the second round of SATs is less than three weeks away. Unlike Stiles, some of us don’t have a full ride to our colleges yet.”

The beach wasn’t quite crowded because it was late fall and kind of cold. Still, everyone dressed in long pants, pull-overs, and sandals, and they played a few games of Frisbee as Scott and Laura fought over the best way to cook burgers. Stiles and Erica braved the cold ocean for a short while, although Erica was smarter than Stiles because she brought a wetsuit and Stiles had just brought his board shorts. Still, they splashed around and surfed a little in the morning even though the waves were almost negligible. It was fun to laugh at each other falling only five seconds after they got up, and after a while they walked back to the beach with their boards tucked under their arms.

“Nice tattoos,” some random guy said to Stiles, his eyes glued to Stiles’s body like he was checking him out. He was older and kind of cute, so Erica told Stiles she would meet him back up with the others and left him with a wink.

Stiles looked into the guy’s startling blue eyes, but his gaze rested on what looked like a regulation military buzz cut. “Um, thanks,” Stiles muttered.

“Some of those look sub-dermal,” the guy continued talking. “Who’s your artist?”

Stiles swallowed, because this guy was eyeing him like a shark, or like he really wanted to bend Stiles over the nearest horizontal surface. “This guy I know in Poland,” Stiles lied easily. 

The guy nodded. “I’ve never seen that style done in Polish. It’s usually Hebrew, isn’t it?”

Stiles stepped back. “What do you want?” he asked, because he wasn’t going to play games with Hottie the Inquisition Guy.

“You American?” the guy asked.

“Born and raised,” Stiles answered. 

Hottie the Inquisition Guy held a card out to Stiles. “We’ve done a little research on you,” he said, his eyes twinkling at Stiles. “I think that, if you’re interested, you might like to get into contact with us.”

Stiles took the card, a linen ivory cardstock with an old typewriter font on it, and it had ‘Merlin Ambrose’ written on one side with a phone number on the back.

“Merlin Ambrose?” Stiles looked at the kid with a raised eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Call me tonight,” the kid said. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be Welsh?” Stiles asked dryly. 

The guy standing in front of him laughed, and then said something in a wet, sloshy sounding language that Stiles had no idea how to interpret. 

“I guess that’s Welsh then?” Stiles asked him.

“Yes, an older version of it,” Merlin smiled at him. 

Stiles nodded and took the card. He looked back up to say something to Merlin, but the man was already gone. “Okay,” Stiles said, and then he walked back to the beach.

“He was hot, did you get his number?” Erica called to Stiles. 

“Yeah,” Stiles said, holding out the card. 

“Whoa, holy professional pick-up artists, Batman,” Erica laughed. “Check out Jack Smith,” she read the card she had pulled away from him.

“Jack Smith?” Stiles asked, looking at the card. Nope, it still read ‘Merlin Ambrose.’ 

“Jack Smith is such a fake name,” Laura rolled her eyes. “Don’t call him, Stiles. He’s a player.”

“No,” Stiles said, taking the card back and showing it to Laura, “I really don’t think that he is.”

Laura read the card with a frown on her face, looking up at Stiles with a shocked, questioning expression. “Really?” she whispered to him, when Erica had turned back to doing something with Lydia.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, “I think it might have really been, he disappeared after he had given me the card. If it isn’t him, then…”

“It’s at least another ma…. Macramé artist,” Laura whispered back urgently, glancing at the others to make sure they hadn’t been heard. “Have you ever gotten to meet any others?”

“A few,” Stiles said vaguely, feeling only slightly guilty that he hadn’t shared all of his secrets with Laura. He didn’t know why, even though he was Pack he never felt able to talk about his magic outside of Family. 

Laura frowned. “You never told me that. Are they like you?” 

“Yeah,” Stiles said. He didn’t bother mentioning that none of them had the power that he had, especially not so young. 

“Hm. Do you think that… Jack Smith could have heard about you from them?”

“I don’t know, he noticed my tattoos,” Stiles said. He always called his magic scars tattoos, although they technically weren’t. “He said he recognized them.”

Laura looked at the blood red tattoos that covered Stiles’s body. “I guess they would be recognizable. Does that mean most of your type has them?”

“Similar,” Stiles agreed. 

“One day you’re telling me everything,” Laura said, glaring at Stiles in a way that was way to reminiscent of her twin brother’s looks.

Stiles looked away. “No, I’m not,” he said softly, and he could feel Laura’s frustration leaking off of her.

It didn’t take him long though, once he was home after the beach party, to text Merlin. –You really don’t look like the guy who played you on BBC, except for the eyes.-

-Too bad, he was kind of hot.- Merlin texted back.

-So what, you’re waiting for Arthur to come back or something?- Stiles asked.

-Something. Have you ever talked to anyone outside of your Family about this?-

-Yes.-

-Not going to share with me who?-

-No. What do you want?- Stiles needed to know. 

-Ever thought about what you wanted to be when you grow up?-

-I thought that I’d get college to decide that?-

-Think a little harder. Now. The people I work for have taken an interest in you. Think about if you want to use your power in your job, or if you’d just like a normal job like everyone else.-

-Shouldn’t you be waiting until I’m a legal adult to be trying to hire me?-

-If you were anything else like the rest of our recruits, then yes. Would it be okay if I came by your house one evening to talk with you and your dad about this?-

Stiles paused. This guy knew a lot about him, and Stiles knew nothing about Merlin at all, besides some badly written French poetry and a few stories that didn’t always make Merlin look like a hero. –Maybe. When?-

-How about Sunday night? I’ll be bringing along another friend.-

Stiles paused again. –Let me ask my dad. I hope you understand that I might say no.-

-We really don’t think you will.- 

So although Stiles didn’t feel very certain about what he was doing, his dad agreed that it was for the best they confront the situation head-on. There was definitely something strange about being approached the way he had been, and something even stranger about the fact that Merlin was contacting him. Stiles’s dad agreed to the meeting, but he did call Mrs. Hale to tell her that they might need back-up in the form of adult werewolves. Talia agreed that she and her husband and Peter would be within earshot the entire night, just in case. 

“So,” John Stilinski started the conversation when Merlin and a man with blond hair show up at their dinner table the next night, “Merlin Emrys?”

“Merlin Ambrose,” Merlin corrected. “Emrys is a Welsh title, actually. It means, ‘immortal.’ Ambrose was the name of my father.”

“Roman,” the blond man spat.

“My father was Roman,” Merlin agreed. “Sheriff, Stiles, this is my associate, Taliesin.”

“You were both advisors to King Arthur,” Stiles said, still not sure if he believed them. “And you’re both alive today?”

“I’m not alive,” Taliesin protested, glaring at Merlin. 

“Taliesin’s a ghost,” Merlin agreed, sticking his hand through the blond man’s chest and pulling it back out as if he were no more than a shadow.

“I hate it when you do that,” Taliesin bitched. 

“So… why are you here?” Stiles decided to ignore the weird, because it was a valid coping method in his life. “Are you working for the British government, and don’t all Welsh object to U.K. leadership as a rule of thumb? I’ve never understood that part of the story…”

“We work for Her Majesty, of course,” Merlin agreed. “But we aren’t here for Her, you understand. We’re here because of an agreement we have with the United Nations.”

Stiles could feel his father tensing up next to him, but he didn’t say anything.

“There is a long-standing agreement outlined in the Geneva Convention that we give this chance to others like yourself, either capable or knowledgeable in the arcane, and that the choice would be that you can join us or we can make you forget about the opportunity. They always have to send someone who is more… powerful than the recruit, and let me tell you Stiles, it has been a very long time indeed before any other country needed someone as powerful as myself. I haven’t gone on a recruitment visitation in ages,” Merlin sounded almost giddy. 

Stiles paused. “I’m being recruited by the United Nations?”

“No, of course not. Not unless you wanted to work for them, after we finished your training of course. Most countries prefer to offer their assets, like yourself, jobs within their own government. You could chose to work for almost any branch of the government that you prefer, although if I was going to make a recommendation, the FBI has a really interesting unit that I get to advise sometimes. They have a particularly good 401k and pension plan, and the working atmosphere is one of the best that I’ve seen in all the branches…”

“What exactly would I be doing, working for the United States government?” Stiles asked. Merlin had ADHD worse than Stiles, apparently.

“Oh, getting ahead of myself,” Merlin smiled, eating some of the food that Stiles had prepared. “We would offer to train you in Folklore, mostly. You’d be given jurisdiction over Supernatural creatures like yourself, trying to solve crimes either perpetrated by them or against them, and keeping the knowledge of them from the general public. Sometimes some of our recruits choose instead to enter into the field of medicine, sometimes journalism, other jobs that would help us out, but your father being a Sheriff, I just thought that you would be more interested in law enforcement of some sort.” 

Stiles’s dad blinked. “Supernatural law enforcement?”

“Yes,” Merlin frowned. “Stiles would attend a school to learn about these things…”

“You want to send me to Hogwarts?” Stiles asked.

“Isn’t that a lovely series?” Merlin grinned, “Fantastic, if I do say so myself on behalf of a fellow countryman, countrywoman? In any case, yes, it would be a type of Hogwarts.You would learn the lore that is associated with certain creatures, the laws we have that govern those creatures, the political treaties and the standard punishments for breaking those treaties… There’s a lot that goes into it, but after my… granted brief but as thorough research into your personality that I was able to do, I think that it would be something that you would find appealing. You are, of course, under no obligation to follow this path, I just happened to stumble onto you when I saw you on the beach, and I thought you would like the opportunity…”

“Shut up Merlin, and let the boy think. You’re always wanting an answer right away,” Taliesin scolded his friend, but Stiles could tell for all of Taliesin’s grump that he actually really liked Merlin. 

Stiles and his dad looked at each other for a while. “It’s interesting,” Stiles smiled at Merlin. “I don’t want to say no, but I would like to know more information before I gave you a yes.”

“Excellent!” Merlin exclaimed, “You have no idea how truly happy I am to hear that. Would you like a tour of the campus?”

“Right now?” Stiles asked.

“If your dad doesn’t mind. I’ll have you back here in...” Merlin looked at Taliesin, “Thirty minutes? Taliesin can last that long without me.”

“You’d better come back,” Taliesin said, “I don’t fancy having to be brought back from the dead again.”

Merlin smiled, looked to John for approval, and then laid a hand on Stiles.

It felt like a jerking sensation, straight from his gut, and then Stiles found himself walking quickly after Merlin down a stone path in a garden. “Of course, you’d only come here once a week during your first week at college, just to kind of keep everything down to manageable stress levels,” Merlin was saying, walking towards a large brown stone building, “but most of the kids here like it. I even teach a class here, but I wouldn’t be your professor until your last year, of course. Oh, I forgot to mention that this is London, and the majority of the magical community studies here…”

Stiles was looking around him at the other kids, some of whom were recognizable in what they were. Some of them were staring at him, too, trying to figure out what he was, but Stiles saw pointed ears and jeweled eyes, strange blue tattoos and one kid even had a tail. Some of them were completely human, like Merlin, and some of them scented the air like the Hales as he walked past them.

Merlin took him quickly to a few classrooms inside the building, where Stiles saw that they were mostly studying herbs or large documents written on parchment, anatomy of different supernatural creatures, and there were a few classes where kids were talking about how some treaties needed to be rewritten to take into account modern means of communication and media. “These are all first year classes, of course, couldn’t let you see the upper classes, they’re mostly on the top floors of the building,” Merlin said as a loud explosion was heard from just that area, but Merlin acted like it was nothing out of the ordinary and just kept talking, “but this is just to give you a taste, of course…”

“This is like Professor X’s school…” Stiles said, “Not so much Hogwarts…”

“Well, to be entirely accurate, yes, much more like the American comic book, but I think that you’ll find…” Merlin started to say.

“How many people are here like me?” Stiles asked.

Merlin scowled. “Most people like you want a more religious background,” Merlin said. “Nothing against religion, of course, lovely thing religion, but most of your type go into rabbinical school. We don’t actually have anyone like you here.”

Stiles nodded his head. “I see.”

“This is just an option that we wanted to make sure that you had…”

“Why me? There were other creatures at the beach…”

Merlin nodded, “We can talk more about that later, but I have to get you back to California,” Merlin said, and he laid his hand back on Stiles’s shoulder.

They appeared back in the kitchen, where Taliesin was cursing. “You were cutting it awfully close, Merlin, I could feel myself starting to disappear…”

“Sorry, mate,” Merlin said sheepishly, “I was just trying to let Stiles see…”

“Yes, yes, well, did you like it?” Taliesin asked Stiles, giving him a glance.

“It was really interesting. We just went to England, dad!” Stiles shouted at his dad, because, it was actually kind of cool what they had just done. 

Stiles’s dad looked shocked.

“Now, you asked why none of your other friends were being recruited?” Merlin said, sitting back down at the table and sipping at his glass that had been there from the meal before.

“Yes,” Stiles said, “I think it’s kind of weird that I know I saw werewolves at that school and that you weren’t recruiting some of my friends.”

“The Hale Territory has an agreement that all those who are born on it cannot be recruited. All families who move to Beacon Hills and have their children on this land are protected,” Merlin said. “As you weren’t born here, you will be the first from this area to have been recruited in over one hundred years, since the treaty was signed.”

“Why would the Hale family not want people here recruited?” the Sheriff asked, immediately latching on to this concern.

“It was more for the militaries,” Merlin said. “You must understand, that this treaty was put into place before the First World War, but it wasn’t like the War was a surprise or anything. There was a huge recruitment going on in the supernatural community at that time, and there are treaties that give supernatural creatures sanctum from our tactics. The members of your peer group will of course be offered jobs from your government, and it will be easier to give them jobs within your government, but they are not allowed to be recruited.”

“I’m part of the Hale Pack,” Stiles said.

“We know, but you are not covered under the treaty. The Hale Pack has never claimed an outsider from Beacon Hills before, you understand. And of course, our recruitment strategies have changed over time. It used to be we just took potentials like yourself, but there are new treaties that govern how we approach you and what we’re allowed to say and in the presence of whom…”

Stiles nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Of course. Now, are you still interested, or do we need to wipe your memories of this night?”

Taliesin slammed his head against the table. “Merlin, you are not subtle at all. You should never be allowed out…”

Stiles was a little startled at Merlin’s question, but it made sense. “I don’t want my memories altered, but I would like to speak to my grandmother.”

“Of course, of course,” Merlin said, “That’s perfectly fine. Taliesin and I will just stay here until you make up your mind. I hope your couch is comfortable…”

“I have a guest room,” the Sheriff offered, “if one of you would like to…”

“I don’t sleep,” Taliesin said. “I am a ghost.”

“Right,” the Sheriff said, pulling at his collar a little. “Well, let me get you settled in while Stiles calls his grandmother.”

Calling Babcia turned out to be a great idea, because she had heard of the organization that Merlin was talking about and she thought it would be a great opportunity for Stiles. She knew a warlock who had attended the school, a friend’s daughter, and she had a really good job in the Polish government and was a highly respected and trusted Paranormal Investigator for them. She was proud that he was getting recruited so early, and by someone as well-known as Merlin, and she almost hung up with Stiles early so that she could call her friend and brag on her grandson to her. 

So once a week, Stiles saw Merlin and went to England for a few hours. Merlin said it wouldn’t be a bad thing for Stiles to meet other Supernatural creatures, and that getting a little early start on his experience wouldn’t go wrong. It added another point of stress in Stiles’s already filled schedule, but it was a good experience.

He was so tired all the time though; between high school, taking Polish classes at the local community college, and hiding the fact that Merlin was magicking him to England weekly, Stiles found himself falling asleep whenever he and Laura and Lydia hung out together. He missed a lot of things, among them chiefly was Laura and Lydia hooking up. He felt kind of weird about it, not noticing for almost a month that his two best friends had started spending most of their free-time making out, and he found himself trying not to freak out about it one night.

Through it all, Stiles kept thinking about Derek. Stiles wanted him so much that it physically hurt, but he knew that it would never be. He tried to get interested in other people, tried to talk himself into a relationship with a dragon at the school, but all he got from that was a bad addiction to cigarettes while the dragon tried to chat him up as they waited for Merlin to come and take him back to America. The dragon was cute, no doubt, but even his cold blue eyes and silver white hair couldn’t hold a candle to how beautiful Derek was to Stiles. After they tried to kiss, Stiles knew that he couldn’t do anything with him, even if he thought that a relationship with a dragon could have been kind of awesome, and by the way that Stiles kissed him back, the dragon knew it, too. 

Stiles was passed out one night in the Hale living room in January when he woke up because he felt Derek’s presence in the room with him. He opened his eyes slightly to see that the lamps had cast their shadows together on the floor, and he bit the inside of his cheek because that was when he knew, without a doubt, that that was all they were ever going to be together. Shadows in a room. He waited until Derek left the room, and then Stiles hugged Laura and Lydia good night, and he went back to his room and cried.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could talk about it to Laura, because she was his best friend, or if he could have talked about it with Derek, so he could just reject him and let Stiles get over it, but he couldn’t talk about it with Laura because he couldn’t just tell his best friend that he was in love with her twin and he couldn’t tell Derek because his twin was Stiles’s best friend. Stiles was stuck with so many emotions and he had no way of letting it out of his system, no way to make it better, and it was driving him insane. 

So insane, in fact, that he became convinced that he was going crazy that spring when he looked up to see Derek Hale staring at him across the hallway.

He was obviously hallucinating, Stiles thought to himself. He probably should tell Merlin that he was going insane, that he was seeing things that weren’t there, and that thought made him angry. Derek Hale pissed him off, even in his hallucinations. 

Since he was going crazy, it wasn’t like he couldn’t just enjoy the downward spiral. So he let himself stare at Derek during lunch, let himself imagine that Derek was staring back, smiling at his attention. Stiles just kept staring until Jackson walked over to their lunch table. Finally, finally someone was going to kill him and put him out of his misery, and Stiles stared at his hands so that Jackson would do it quickly.

Instead of threatening to kill Stiles, shock of all shocks, Jackson invited them to a party at his house Friday. Stiles wasn’t going to go, of course, but it was still crazy that Jackson had invited them to a party.

Stiles knew he stared at Jackson sauntering all the way back to his cafeteria table, knew his mouth had fallen open in shock when, after Jackson had said a few words to Derek, Derek’s head had fallen back and he laughed loudly. Knew it was probably because Stiles was going insane, and he had entered crazy opposite world or something, and that he should just get comfortable in the fact that he was crazy because it was probably a permanent state of being that he would never get better from. 

Even that Wednesday night, when Stiles was eating dinner with the Hale family, Stiles knew he was being crazy when Derek asks him, “You’re going to Poland for college?” 

Stiles hadn’t even realized that he had been talking about college, because Derek’s presence had thrown him off so badly that he had just been babbling about anything that he could think of. “Yeah, I have enough credits to graduate in December, so I’ll be starting Spring Semester in Poland.”

Derek looked really upset for some reason, so Stiles decided that he was going to go with the theme of insanity for the week and he followed him up to his attic. “You mad at me?” he asked inanely, because what else was he going to ask?

“No,” Derek said, staring at the sketch pad in front of him, glaring like he was going to light it on fire with the power of his mind. 

“What’s going on?” Stiles decided to ask, because… insane, there was no other explanation.

“What do you mean?” Derek asked, but that was okay because Stiles was crazy this week anyway, and in all likelihood they were only having this conversation in his mind. 

“I…” Stiles wondered how to put it, because he couldn’t admit to Derek, even insanity-hallucinatory Derek, that he couldn’t stop thinking about him, “You’re acting strange. Stranger. Than usual.”

Derek kept glaring at his paper, but Stiles had had enough.

“Derek, we really need to talk, man…” Stiles decided that he was going to say everything so that Derek could just laugh in his face or maybe even beat him up for thinking that way about him. Stiles knew Derek was straight, knew that Derek liked women and had plenty of evidence from the surrounding female population at school that Derek liked women, but he had to get it out there.

“There’s too many things to say, there’s no point,” Derek said, and that shocked Stiles into stillness. That was not what he expected to hear at all, and it made no sense with his perception of reality. Things to say meant that Derek was keeping secrets from him, too, and Stiles needed, desperately, to know what was going on in Derek’s head.

“I don’t know how to fix it if you don’t tell me what’s wrong,” Stiles almost whispered, because he didn’t know how to fix his crazy insane brain, and he needed more input from Derek because his world was fracturing around him, and he wasn’t even sure why.

Derek was staring at him. That was quite all right with Stiles, because he was staring right back, but Derek was staring at him and Stiles couldn’t figure out why. He kept looking at Stiles’s mouth and then up into his eyes, and Stiles almost kissed him, but he turned around and ran away from Derek because he didn’t know what else to do.

When Merlin came over on Thursday to take him on his weekly trip to England, Stiles was still sitting on his bed, staring at the wall. 

“What happened?” Merlin asked, sitting next to Stiles.

“I’m not sure. To be honest, I think I’m going crazy,” Stiles told him.

Merlin smiled, in an old man kind of way, and it reminded Stiles that he was sitting next to a man who, from a historical viewpoint, was approximately 1,600 years old. Stiles giggled a little at that thought, because sitting next to a legendary figure, discussing the merits of his relative sanity, right before they went to a school where Stiles had turned down a potential suitor who also happened to be a dragon? Great argument for sanity there. “Perhaps, we should skip school today.” 

“What?” Stiles was shocked. He had never skipped school before. He’d even gone when he was sick, just because he couldn’t stand to not be doing something. 

“You’re not exactly getting graded for anything at that school, Stiles. There’s things to life other than learning.”

Stiles stared at Merlin. “I don’t think that you’re a very good mentor, telling me to skip school.”

“I’m the best there is. Come on, let’s take a walk.”

Stiles got up and followed Merlin out of his house, into the woods near the Hale House. It was good, being surrounded by nature, feeling the wild things around him, even if he was near to town. 

“One of the things we often forget, is that we are human,” Merlin said, staring out into the forest. “We forget to take time to ourselves, to remember what we really want, to remember that we are more than our minds and our bodies.”

Stiles didn’t really get what Merlin was saying, but he stayed quiet instead of asking questions. 

“When’s the last time you got laid, Stiles?” Merlin asked.

“What?” Stiles asked, because that was insane. “I’m seventeen…”

“And a bag of walking hormones, so, when is the last time you did something that was just fun? Have you ever gotten drunk? Have you tried to ask someone out? When is the last time you painted a picture, or planted a flower? What was the last party you were at?”

“I don’t have time…”

“You’re a teenager,” Merlin said gently. “You should be doing teenage things. You aren’t ever going to be a teenager again. You have plenty of time to be an adult, plenty of time to take responsibility and further your plans for whatever your end goal is. You’ve already been accepted into university, the only thing they’re waiting for is for you to turn eighteen. Take this time and live a little, throw caution to the wind, smoke a joint, drink a beer, partake in those cigarettes that I see you trying to sneak all the time…”

“You are actually the worst mentor in the world,” Stiles said. 

“No, you’re an overachiever who’s going to burn out before you turn twenty. When you get to college, you’re going to have freedom for the first time in your life and you are going to literally go insane. Get it out of your system now, Stiles, go a little crazy. Kiss someone. Get high. Get drunk. Talk back to your dad. Show a little life, live it a little, take advantage of being a kid. Ask out the prettiest girl in your class…”

Stiles turned red at that, and Merlin laughed a little. “I don’t like the prettiest girl in my class. She’s my best friend’s girlfriend.”

“You like someone?” Merlin asked. 

Stiles took a deep breath. “I like my best friend’s twin brother,” Stiles whispered.

Merlin smiled. “Ask him out. Kiss him. You’re not a bad looking kid, he probably won’t say no.”

“He’s straight,” Stiles said, staring at the forest floor.

Merlin laughed. “He’s not the only person in the world, and I know that there are people interested in you. You don’t have to wait for true love, Stiles, because it will find you.”

Stiles felt miserable. “I feel horrible kissing anyone else.”

Merlin sighed. “There are other things to do than play at love-making. Do something, Stiles. Anything.”

Stiles thought about Jackson’s party that Friday. “There’s a party tomorrow night. I wasn’t going to go…”

“Go, or I’m not coming back until you’ve done something that’s just a little bit bad.”

Stiles nodded his head. “Fine, I’ll go.”

“Good. I’m holding you to that promise,” Merlin said. “See you next week?”

Stiles nodded his head, and then Merlin left.

So, Friday night, Stiles told his dad he was going to Jackson’s party. His dad looked about as shocked as Stiles felt, but when Laura and Lydia drove up to pick him up, he told Stiles to stay over at Laura’s house if he was going to be drinking, and that he didn’t want to have to lock him or any of his friends up so he needed to make sure that someone was a designated driver, and that if he had sex he should use a condom, and Stiles ran out of his house before his dad could say anything else that made him feel like he was going any crazier. 

The party had barely started, and Stiles and Laura and Lydia stood around awkwardly for the first half hour or so. Then they split up so that Stiles could find something to drink, and Laura and Lydia had disappeared somewhere girly with Erica and Allison, and Scott had tagged along with them. Stiles was looking around for them when Jackson and Boyd cornered him.

“Glad you’re here, Stiles,” Jackson said, and his grin was a little scary, to be honest. 

“Um,” Stiles said, but then Jackson and Boyd had both claimed one of his arms and Stiles found himself shoved into a closet. 

He tried the doorknob, but the closet was locked.

Great. He tried to go out and be a normal boy, and his troubles had gotten him locked in a closet at the first party he ever went to. Well, he could scratch this thing off his bucket list, because he was never doing this again. He wondered if he was ever going to be let out of the closet, or if he was just going to spend the night there.

He briefly debated using his magic to get out, trying to remember a spell that would allow him to escape without anyone noticing that he was using magic, and then the door opened again and another body was shoved through the opening. 

“Shit,” Stiles heard Derek say, and he heard him trying to open the door that had been locked again.

“Derek?” Stiles asked.

“Stiles?” Derek’s voice was there, right in there in the closet with Stiles, and Stiles tried to breathe. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“Fine, fine, I’ve just been locked in here a long time,” Stiles tried to sound calm, like it was no big deal, and he wanted to die because Derek was seeing what a huge loser he was firsthand. He thought for a minute though, because Derek wasn’t a loser, and what the hell was he doing in the closet with Stiles? “I thought that was why they invited me, so that they could lock me in the closet like assholes do, but why would they lock you up in here?”

Stiles heard Derek sliding down the wall. He took a deep breath, and exhaled really loudly. “Because they didn’t lock us up in a closet Stiles, not like that. They locked us up here together.”

“Why?” Stiles asked, because he genuinely had no idea.

“Because I like you,” Derek said quickly and a little nervously.

Crazy. There was no other explanation. “What? Since when?” Stiles wanted to laugh. He was hallucinating again. Derek wasn’t really in the closet with him, he was just imagining this whole situation.

“I don’t know, maybe forever,” Derek said quietly. 

Stiles couldn’t believe it. “But… you had a million girlfriends this year,” Stiles tried to reason with his hallucination, because that was a definite sign of mental stability. Derek was straight, Stiles could latch on to that. “Girls, all of them, every single one of them. Why would you like me?”

“Jesus Stiles,” Derek sounds like he doesn’t believe that Stiles doesn’t already know, “I’m being honest, Laura told me to stay away from you. So I did. I had to distract myself somehow.”

Laura had kept Derek from Stiles? Stiles couldn’t believe it; Laura was his best friend. She would at least talk to Stiles beforehand, wouldn’t she? “So what,did Laura change her mind?” Stiles was skeptical, “She said, it’s okay if you and Stiles are friends now?”

Derek’s laugh surprises Stiles more than anything, because of how dry and bitter it sounds. “She gave me back my pictures of you.”

Stiles just can’t believe it. If it’s true… if it’s true, then that’s a huge betrayal on Laura’s part. It’s shattering, and if Stiles is going crazy and his hallucination is taking his trust in Laura away, and if what Derek is saying is in any way true, then Laura has completely overstepped her bounds as best friend. Laura didn’t even ask Stiles if he wanted protection from Derek, and now Stiles needs to know if it’s a hallucination or not. Stiles needs to know that Derek’s really in there, that it’s not just Derek’s voice, that Derek is physically in the closet with Stiles because Stiles needs to know. He lets the magical electricity that is always surrounding him loose, lets his tattoos light up, casts the easiest spell he knows and fills the closet with low, almost crimson light. “I have to see what you’re saying… what are you saying?” Stiles almost doesn’t want it to be true, because that means that Laura isn’t who he thought she was.

“I’m saying I’m in love with you, and I have been for a very long time. My friends just thought they could give us an opportunity to talk about it. They weren’t making fun of you, they were giving me a chance with you.”

Stiles wasn’t sure if he could believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, but he did at the same time, because it meant so many things that he didn’t want to face. “You like me?” he asked, because he had to see Derek’s face when he said it, had to know for sure that it was true.

Derek smiled at Stiles, and it was the most devastating thing that Stiles had ever seen. It said that Derek was resigned to the fact that he was alone, but then Derek said, “If you don’t like me back, I’ll understand. It’ll take me a while to get over it, so it’s probably a good thing you’re moving to Poland to go to college in less than a year, but it feels better telling you. Now that you know, I feel so much better.”

It’s true. Derek was telling the truth. Stiles knew it and now he had to decide what to do with that truth. Derek really liked him, and this wasn’t a joke. 

Laura ruined it, opening the door, “I can’t believe they locked you in here. God, are they freshmen?” and she reaches in to haul her brother and Stiles out of the closet.

Stiles followed Laura just for a second, before he really let himself get mad. “You kept your brother away from me?”

Laura looked at the ground. “Yes,” she confessed. “I thought I was protecting you.”

“That wasn’t protection, Laura,” Stiles said, getting really angry. “That hurt. It hurt me, to think that he wasn’t even interested, that I had no chance…”

Laura looked up at him, surprised, “You like him?”

“Laura, I’ve been pining over him since I first saw him,” Stiles said, “You never noticed?”

“No!” Laura said, “I thought you didn’t like him! I thought he bothered you, but you were just too nice to say anything because he was my brother!”

“I never said anything because I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable that your best friend had gay feelings for your brother, which were obviously not returned… or so I thought…”

“I don’t care that you’re gay!” Laura whispered angrily. “Why couldn’t you tell me how you felt about Derek? I thought you were my best friend!”

“He is your best friend, Laura,” Lydia slid smoothly into the conversation, handing both Stiles and Laura a drink. “You just chose not to really look at how he looked at Derek. Everyone knows except for your and your thick-headed brother, how Stiles feels about him. Everyone also knows how Derek feels about Stiles, except for apparently Stiles. You didn’t want to see, Laura, so you didn’t. Now drink your drink, and chill the fuck out. We’re at a party, and I intend to enjoy it.”

Stiles stalked away from Laura at that point, not really wanting to see her at all. He lit a cigarette on the back porch of Jackson’s house, inhaling the smoke deeply. He saw Derek hanging out with his friends across the yard, saw how none of them cared that Danny was making out with some guy, and it shocked him. Jocks were supposed to be stereotypical gay-haters, but none of Derek’s friends seemed to care at all. It was messing with his mind, and not in a good way. 

It’s like they moved at the same time, venturing off into the woods behind Jackson’s house. The noises from the house faded away, muted by the trees and the grass, and Stiles leaned up against the tree, feeling a lot more drunk from being so close to Derek alone in the woods than from the actual alcohol that he had been drinking. 

“You really like me,” Stiles stated, not even really a question anymore. 

“Yes, I really do,” Derek said, staring into Stiles’s eyes like he didn’t want to look anywhere else. 

“You really aren’t fucking with me?” Stiles asked, because he had to know for sure that Laura had really done what she had done, and he had to know that Derek wasn’t actually fucking around because he hadn’t really shown interest before, “Because that would be a shitty thing to lie about, Derek. It’s hard to believe that you feel anything at all for me when we’ve barely talked to each other for years, when we’ve just been shadows in a room together. We’ve skirted the periphery of each other’s presence for years.”

Derek nodded, because what Stiles was saying wasn’t exactly news to either of them. “So the question remains, Stiles, how do you feel about me?”

Stiles thought about the advice that Merlin had given him, and then he decided he didn’t care. Because he and Derek were there, and they liked each other, and more importantly Derek was just there. So he stepped up close to Derek and laid his top lip against his, a smooth slide of skin. Derek’s arms reached around Stiles’s body and pulled him in closer as their mouths opened, and Stiles reached up to hold Derek’s face, their mouths moving in a silken dance that caused all thought to fly out of Stiles’s head. He didn’t know anything, couldn’t feel anything at all except for Derek’s mouth, and then somehow Derek’s hands were on his ass and Stiles’s legs popped open, wrapping around Derek’s waist. His weight wasn’t a big deal to Derek, he could hold Stiles up, and Stiles could concentrate on how tight his body felt against Derek’s, how good it felt to slide his erection against Derek’s stomach. Derek had him propped up with his hands on Stiles’s thighs, and all Stiles wanted, all he needed, was just to be a little bit closer. His body undulated against Derek’s, his hands gripped Derek’s shoulders, and then Derek had him on the ground. 

Stiles wasn’t protesting at all, it felt too good, almost unreal. He was taking advantage of everything he could, brought his hands up and down Derek’s body in a desperate need to feel, to know and catalogue everything about the experience. Stiles slid his hands down Derek’s body as Derek was tasting his neck, cupped Derek’s ass because it just felt perfect in his hands, pulled down so that Derek’s erection slid against his own. Stiles gasped for breath, thinking that he could come like this alone, could feel it starting in his toes, and he arched up to get just a little bit closer to Derek, to rub his body against Derek’s.

“Stiles?” he heard Laura’s voice somewhere far away. “Stiles, we’re about to go… oh.”

Derek stilled above him, staring into his eyes, and then he rolled off of Stiles and pulled him up by the hand. “I’ll take him home, Laura,” and Stiles couldn’t take his eyes off of Derek to figure out her response. 

They were quiet in the car, and Stiles simply followed Derek to his room, where he had never been before. Derek took his clothing off and slid into his bed, and after a moment to process that action Stiles followed, pulling his clothing off as quickly as possible. 

Derek pulled him in closer, and he whispered, “Is this okay?”

Stiles answered him with a kiss, and that was all it took. They were naked, and Stiles gasped for breath when Derek’s smooth hands slid over his skin. Derek seemed to like the callouses on Stiles’s hands, trembled every time one of them snagged on his skin, and flat out moaned when Stiles wrapped his hand around their cocks. 

“God Stiles, your hands,” Derek whispered into his mouth. “Think about them all the time.”

Stiles smiled as Derek fucked into his hand, glancing down to stare at Derek’s uncircumcised penis, watching the skin pulling back over his dark cockhead. It was rougher than Stiles’s, Stiles had been circumcised, of course, but all Stiles wanted to do was get Derek into his mouth.

Derek let Stiles push him back and he almost moaned when Stiles climbed down his body. Stiles licked Derek, tasting him and feeling the smooth skin with his tongue, pulling him into his mouth with a light suction. Derek buried his hands in Stiles’s hair, not pulling or holding him, but Stiles sank down so that he could pull back up, leaving spit to slide down, giving some lubrication for Stiles’s hand to grab at the base of Derek’s dick. He worked Derek with his mouth and his hand in tandem, using his other hand to lightly tug at Derek’s balls, something Stiles liked when he was masturbating. Derek’s balls were tight though, and soon enough Derek whispered a warning before he filled Stiles’s mouth. Stiles couldn’t swallow quick enough and he felt Derek dripping out of his mouth, but Derek didn’t care and pulled him up to kiss it out of him. 

Derek pushed Stiles back into the mattress with a smug smile. Apparently, he wasn’t the type to pass out after coming, and he bit and growled and licked his way down Stiles’s body. 

Stiles was twitching, he was so turned on, and Derek had to hold him down so that he could take Stiles into his mouth. 

Stiles couldn’t control his hips, but Derek didn’t seem to mind at all, wrapping his hands around Stiles’s ass so that he could pull him deeper into his throat. Stiles clutched at Derek’s hair, threw his head back and just didn’t last long at all. 

Derek laughed a little, pulling Stiles into his arms as Stiles felt his mind going blank. 

“Where’d you learn that?” Stiles wondered out loud.

Derek kissed the juncture between Stiles’s neck and his shoulder, where Stiles was pretty sure a big bruise would appear the next day. “First time,” Derek whispered, his voice hoarse because he’d just let Stiles fuck his throat, swallowed Stiles cum, and Stiles was pretty sure that he should have been embarrassed about it but he just couldn’t make himself. 

The next morning, it was like they couldn’t stop talking to each other long enough to do anything else. Their hands still touched, and they still had to trace each other’s bodies with shy fingertips, but mostly it was talking with a few kisses thrown in just to remind themselves that they could, that they were allowed, that it was real. 

Mrs. Hale pounded on the door long enough to demand the boys come out of Derek’s room long enough to get some food, and Stiles grinned when Derek dressed him in some of his clothing. 

Inseparable was a word for it, Stiles was sure. Derek understood that they had to be apart when Stiles went to the community college for lessons, and Stiles understood when Derek had practice after school. They ended up spending every night together, and neither of their parents protested at all, which was just a sign of how they knew that Derek and Stiles had liked each other all along. Sometimes they slept in Stiles’s room, but more often they were at the Hales’ because Derek had a bigger bed. 

Derek was fascinated by what little information Stiles could give him about his magical studies. He seemed proud of the fact that Stiles got treated differently than his cousins, and it gave Stiles some confidence that he wasn’t such a freak. Stiles understood how Derek felt frustrated because he had to hold back all the time when he was doing sports, and the way Derek kissed him for that understanding led Stiles to believe that Derek was just happy that Stiles really understood and wasn’t placating him.

On the last day of school, Stiles had to finish up some paperwork for his graduation that December. Most of the other kids were going from classroom to classroom getting yearbooks signed, saying good-bye to the English teacher who wouldn’t be back the next year because she was getting her third book published and was going on a tour, or outside playing sports (or saying they were outside playing sports, when in actuality they were skipping school and hanging out at the carwash or a fast food chain) so he was stuck in the library. He had almost finished with everything, waiting by the fax machine in the empty room for his dad’s signature, when Derek found him.

“Hey,” Stiles smiled, every time he saw Derek now he smiled, and Derek smiled back and they both blushed. 

Derek leaned against the library counter, his eyes taking a slow trek up and down Stiles’s body. The fax machine made a sound, indicating that his dad’s signature was on the paper, but Stiles was too busy watching Derek swing his lower body over the counter by bracing himself on one arm, and then crowding him up against the wall. “Hi,” Derek said, with a grin on his lips.

“Hi…” Stiles almost said, back to him. Derek’s hands rested on Stiles’s hips, and he pulled Stiles into his body. 

Stiles moaned at the action, wrapping his arms around Derek’s neck and pulling him in so that he could get closer to those lips. 

Part of how quickly they got turned on was each other, but it was also the first time that they had done this where they could have been caught. Stiles’s breath hitched when Derek rubbed up against him, the layers of clothing between them didn’t really hide the fact that they were both hard and straining against each other. Frottage. It was a thing. A beautiful, glorious thing.

Stiles’s head dropped back against the wall, he tried to gasp for breath but Derek wasn’t going to allow him. He chased Stiles’s lips, pushing Stiles’s legs out so that he could step closer into his body. Stiles liked it when Derek moved him, liked his strength and his purpose, liked feeling the warmth of his body even closer even though the library had a shitty air conditioning system and it was hot in there. 

Derek’s hands gripped his ass as he shoved up against him, and Stiles knew that he wasn’t going to last too much longer. 

Derek pulled back suddenly, and Stiles blinked a few times to see Derek’s back straight in front of him. He wanted to bite his neck, wanted to rub up against Derek’s ass, but he saw what made Derek stop.

Two little freshmen girls were staring at them with wide eyes. Stiles kind of tried to smile at them, and he looked over at Derek to see that he was already giving them that fake smile that he gave to all the girls, and the girls giggled and ran away, whispering to each other. 

“Well,” Derek said, “we probably shouldn’t do this in public places…” he hissed as Stiles grabbed his hips and bit his neck, rubbing himself up against Derek’s ass like he had wanted. Derek’s hand reached around and grabbed Stiles’s ass, and Stiles rubbed himself off just like that, sliding his hand into Derek’s jeans (because Derek went commando, of course he did) and wrapping his fingers around Derek’s cock. They both came within minutes of each other, and then had to sneak into the boy’s bathroom so that they could dry their pants under the hand dryer. Still, they kissed and kissed while they were doing it, and the almost empty school didn’t even notice when they left a few hours early right after Stiles turned in his paperwork. 

Derek had to reassure Stiles a thousand times that he wasn’t going to leave him again when he got back from Poland. Stiles was so worried, but Derek’s simple, “Trust me, please,” killed his need for reassurances. Derek was the one who drove him to the airport, and kissing him before he got on the plane was the highlight of his entire trip there. 

Merlin showed up at Babcia’s castle, and after saying a few disparaging things about haughty princes and how stupid they were he proceeded to teach Stiles that he wasn’t the most powerful magic user in the world, by like, a lot. And Stiles was actually kind of happy to hear that, because it had kind of worried him. Stiles met other wizards and shape changers and mythological creatures that Merlin had met, and they all came to the castle despite the rabbis who weren’t fond of meeting them. Stiles liked it though, and his Babcia loved it, because she was worried that Stiles was going to get a big head. 

Stiles went to the Universtiy of Warsaw to speak with his future professors, and so that he could get the layout of the campus in his head. There weren’t a lot of people getting their double Bachelors in Mythology & Folklore and Criminology, and the school was perfectly aware of Stiles’s ‘extenuating circumstances’ because it wasn’t like Stiles was actually the first magic user to go through their doors. They set up his schedule, scheduled which day Merlin would come and pick him up to take him to campus in England, and before he knew it the summer was over and it was time to return to Derek’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started posting this, I had all but this chapter written. So I haven't even started on the next chapter yet... it won't be up for a while. Sorry about that! 
> 
> Also... I'm thinking of going back and changing Angel's name to Cora... she just hadn't existed when I started writing it in cannon. Would that be weird, or should I just leave it like I have it?


	6. Chapter 6

It took seconds for Derek to greet Stiles after he opened the door from his dad’s cruiser. Stiles fell into Derek’s arms, relieved and thrilled to feel their strength around him again. It was the best feeling that Stiles knew, and he counted the seconds until they could be alone again. 

Stiles was surprised when Derek kissed him in front of their families, but he didn’t bother protesting the action. He couldn’t make himself want to, and as none of their family members said anything about it they kept their arms around each other as Stiles remained vague about what he had done over the summer.

It was something that always bothered him, that none of them ever probed into what Stiles spent his summers doing. Even when his dad signed his papers to visit Rome, his dad never asked. He wondered how much the adults in his life knew what he got up to in Europe, but they never hinted that they knew anything other than Stiles spent his summers with his eccentric grandmother and some cousins and aunts and uncles. It sometimes led to major disconnects in his psyche, and he had to remind himself that they had no idea and that they would probably be more comfortable not having any idea that he spent hours learning how to battle other wizards and supernatural creatures, learning how to be politic with heads of state and other agencies, and being put into somewhat of a supernatural spotlight with others of their kind. 

He enjoyed being a nobody though, enjoyed not having to tell anyone, even Derek, about what he was doing. He didn’t like being fawned over by others and being worried about by his grandmother and relatives. It was nice to come home and be treated like a normal teenager, and he decided that he wouldn’t tell anyone at all if it meant that no one made a fuss over him when he was in Beacon Hills.

Derek did make a fuss over his new tattoos, though. Stiles spent their first night together in Derek’s bed, while he traced them with his fingertips and then his tongue, over and over again. Derek claimed that he was making sure that they didn’t taste differently than the rest of his skin, which was a ludicrous thought, but Stiles didn’t care about it. He was thrilled to let Derek push his body around, thrilled to let Derek take charge when Stiles was being groomed every summer to be a leader and in charge of things in his own right. He understood that people wanted him to uphold his community and his magick, but he luxuriated in Derek’s dominance over him. 

Derek did want to see what Stiles was capable of, and as Stiles had passed some tests that would allow him to perform magick away from his grandmother; he took his love deep into the woods one day so that he could show off, just a little, for Derek.

He stuck with simple spells, one word castings that showed Derek how powerful he was. Derek wasn’t as impressed as some of the rabbis had been when he had performed the spells in front of them a few years previously, but Derek didn’t know that what Stiles was doing was actually almost impossible for any other magick user to perform. He was quietly delighted as a child was for a circus performer, enjoying the pretty tricks with no knowledge of how much power and work it took for the performance. Stiles found that he didn’t care about that at all, and that he simply wanted to see the look of delight on Derek’s face when he saw what Stiles could do. 

When school started again, Stiles got used to being referred to as ‘Derek’s boyfriend.’ It was a little strange that no one seemed to care and even kind of expected them to last over the summer, but Stiles took a secret thrill to be referred to as such, especially since Derek was referred to as ‘Stiles’s boyfriend’ when he was introduced to the kids in the AP classes. Their friendship groups weren’t exactly the same, but lots of the kids liked showing up at each other’s’ parties now that they were older and more aware that this was their last year with some of them. 

Derek showed up at Stiles’s Cross Country meet first, cheering Stiles on and making lots of noise when Stiles would come in second or third. So no one commented at all when Stiles showed up at Derek’s Lacrosse games, even though it was more popularly attended with parents and alumni. Stiles and Derek both talked to recruiters for college, although since Stiles told them he was already going to be attending a school out of country and there wasn’t a Lacrosse team at the University of New Orleans, which is where Derek decided to go, it was just to pass time until their teammates could talk to the coaches. 

School was busy, and Stiles hated it because it meant time was going faster. He couldn’t get enough time with Derek, even with them spending the night at one or the others house every single night. It wasn’t like every night together was sexy, but on weekends they would spend hours exploring each other with fingertips and lips and teeth and tongue. It was wonderful, but it just kept going way too fast.

The night before Halloween, Derek was over at Stiles’s house. Stiles had been fixing them dinner (with enough left-over for his dad) when he finally broke down and told Derek how he had been feeling.

“It’s going too fast,” Stiles told him.

“What?” Derek asked.

“Our time together, it’s going too fast. I have to leave in January, Derek. That means we only have two months left together, and then I’m going to be in Poland. You’re going to keep going to school, and you’re not going to miss me, and you’re going to start going out with Jackson or Danny because they’re here and I’m not. And every time I come home I’m going to have to watch you with someone else, and it’s going to be horrible, and I…”

 

“Hey, hey,” Derek said, coming over to Stiles and putting his hand over his mouth. “None of that, don’t be like that,” Derek said. “We’re going to spend some time apart, but it’s not going to be like that. It’s not going to hurt us, we love each other, right?”

Stiles took a breath and looked into Derek’s eyes. He seemed like he was believing what he was saying, and Stiles wanted to agree with it, but he was scared of it. 

“Look, why don’t I spend tomorrow night with you instead of the Pack?” Derek asked him.

“Can you do that?” Stiles asked, “You’ve never spent a full moon away from the Pack.”

“I’m fine with you,” Derek promised. “We can’t go to a party or anything, but I’m fine with you if we’re by ourselves. I’ll be able to Anchor with you.”

So they spent Halloween together. It felt good, and Derek only jumped a little when the doorbell rang with small children begging candy bribes for not being demonic assholes, and Stiles went straight back to Derek after every visitation to straddle his lap and kiss him to keep his mind off of the fact that he wasn’t running with the Pack. 

Derek’s parents were thrilled that Derek got through the full moon by himself with only Stiles by his side, so when College Week came around in November, Derek was allowed to go to New Orleans with only Stiles as a companion to visit his school and do a basic orientation around campus. 

They rented a room at The French Market Inn on Decatur, paying the extra $10 to get a room with windows. The receptionist liked them and got them a room on the fourth floor and passed them a map of the city.

They had already been briefed on tourism in New Orleans, and all of the tourist shops stressed that this was not Disney World. They carried fifteen dollars in their pocket for mugging money and the rest of their money in their shoes. 

Because New Orleans was in Louisiana and therefore operated on Napoleonic Code instead of Constitutional Code like the rest of America, they weren’t quite as strict on their drinking ages at certain bars. Many of the residents lamented the fact that the drinking age changed from eighteen to twenty-one fifteen years previously, and everyone turned a blind eye to underage drinking. 

Stiles and Derek bought trolley passes so that they wouldn’t have to lease a car, and like most of the other Freshmen that were in the city that week they spent their time pleasantly buzzed.

Going to the school only took one afternoon, and it was a basic run-down of where the main buildings were and where to go for food and how to handle muggers and which sections of the city it was best to avoid. It was kind of boring for both Derek and Stiles, but once it was over they had an entire week to explore.

They ended up not really leaving the French Quarter (except to go on a quick tour of the Garden District, because those houses were amazing,) and discovered that there was really no reason to get up before noon as that was when most of the shops opened, and stayed up late with the rest of the city. 

For a city in the South, there was an alarming number of rainbow flags hung from every balcony and on every block in the entire city.

They hung out a little at Jackson Square, watching the fortune tellers and the art vendors, and went across the street to Café Dumonde to eat their weight’s worth in beignets and chicory coffee. At night they ate Po’ Boys (Stiles preferred the shrimp, while Derek tried to get him to eat more of his oysters) and at night they filled up on red beans and rice, jambalaya, and shrimp etoufee. They went to Lafitte’s in Exile, the oldest gay bar in America, and snuck bright green icy Hurricanes through a straw while most of the patrons smiled at them.

Stiles didn’t speak French at all, but Derek had taken it for his foreign language requirement so they could communicate with all the residents, with Derek only pausing occasionally to ask about the differences in the Cajun dialect. 

On Friday, Derek took Stiles to meet the Pack he would be staying with when he moved there the next year. The Pack isn’t sure which family that Derek will be staying with specifically, but as soon as he introduced Stiles one of them recognized what he was. Stiles didn’t think that Derek saw the one wolf in the back that cocked his head at Stiles, but soon all of the wolves knew Stiles used magick.

It was strange to be known for what he was rather than who he was, and he actually kind of liked being respected as a generic wizard. There was no one asking him questions about what he could actually do, and no one tried to impress him with how powerful they were. They accepted his presence with the sort of respect that Stiles appreciated, one supernatural creature talking to someone capable of the supernatural. They welcomed him because of his ties with Derek, and Stiles loved that they wanted him to come along with Derek, although they understood why he couldn’t. 

Stiles did like the feeling of New Orleans, though. Even after traveling everywhere, it carried the feeling of history and home, and he wanted to never leave. No one looked strangely at Derek and him as they walked down the streets holding hands, and a few of the girls and boys feinted swooning when they saw them together. They were invited to shows, although, they were told, if they wanted a real gothic experience they would have to travel up with a group to Memphis once a month, because after Katrina New Orleans had lost a lot of its scene due to popular funding being pushed in other directions. 

They met with the leader of the New Orleans gothic scene on accident, a man named Maven, who seemed more than willing to show them around his city. He passed them off to a tour guide who was also a VooDoo practitioner, and he and Stiles traded a few random facts about their magick before the man left him and Derek in Marie Laveau’s old shop in the Quarter. 

Derek seemed thrilled with the respect that Stiles was given at the shop, as the clerk there immediately recognized his tattoos and called in some of her co-workers so that they could buy a few spells off of him. Stiles had never been to a place where magic was so openly practiced, even with normal humans walking into the shop around him. They flirted with Derek a little, and Derek might or might not have noticed, Stiles wasn’t very sure.

It meant that Stiles did ask Derek’s foster Pack about Tulane’s graduate program. They very helpfully gave him as much information as they knew, and gave Stiles the phone number to one of the admissions officers of the school.

Going back to Beacon Hills felt like the last chapter of a good book that Stiles didn’t want to put down. He dreaded being separated from Derek. Everyone had told him how long distance relationships never worked, but they didn’t know him, they didn’t know Derek. 

Their last few months were spent making love. They separated long enough to make family gatherings, but everyone seemed to understand that they were both slightly panicked at the thought of leaving each other and left them alone for the most part. Stiles didn’t want to leave Derek, but he had already made his decisions. This was the best way to provide for Derek that Stiles knew. He wanted to buy Derek the world, much as Derek’s parents had been able to do, and he couldn’t start that off with massive student debt and ridiculous amounts of people always hounding him for what he could do. He couldn’t afford to risk Derek’s secret, and Derek had no idea how likely that was to happen because of his association with Stiles.

He talked some with Merlin about it, but Merlin didn’t understand and had even told him that. Merlin had no one that he had to protect like Stiles did, Merlin was simply waiting for the love of his life to be reborn. He hoped that when Arthur did come back, the world would know about the Supernatural and he wouldn’t have to hide anymore.

With all the extra classes that Stiles was taking, it was getting to the point where Stiles didn’t understand how the rest of the world had no idea what was happening. Granted, the Supernatural community was overly gifted with hiding all evidence, what with their people in the know placed in strategic and influential positions placed all over the world. The only thing they couldn’t control was ghosts, really, and most of them tried to disprove them by having TV shows disproving apparitions, which they did a pretty good job of doing. 

Mrs. Hale and Uncle Peter took Stiles aside once, after Christmas. Uncle Peter asked Stiles about his family in Poland, what they expected from him, what the Hale Pack was going to be required to contribute if there was an official alliance made between the two families. Stiles explained that he could not speak for his grandmother, but he did explain that he would look out for Derek first and foremost in all things. 

The conversation was long and twisted, but in the end Stiles swore Derek would never know about the castle in Poland, would never know how Stiles’s family really worked, and as far as Stiles was concerned, he was happy with that. Derek would never have to protect Stiles’s secrets if he didn’t know about them.

Derek wouldn’t look at Stiles’s plane tickets, and he spent time away from Stiles only when he was packing his bags for Poland. Stiles was happy about that, it covered up exactly how few things Stiles actually had to take to Poland, as he had everything he needed over there. The only things that Stiles was packing were some of Derek’s clothing and the laptop that his dad had given him. It wasn’t the greatest computer of all time, but Stiles had a few in Poland that were top of the line, so Stiles figured it would be his dedicated fun computer, with Skype always on when he was home so Derek could contact him whenever he wanted.

He did pack a few pieces of clothing that were important to him: his dad’s old Yarmulke that his mother had embroidered, his Beacon Hills Cross Country hoodie, a flannel that Scott had given him and never wanted back.

He drove around Beacon Hills his last day there and tried not to make fun of himself. It was only a couple of months, he tried to convince himself, but it felt like the end, and Stiles really didn’t like endings. He spent two hours shooting zombies with Scott, delivered a book that he thought Allison would like to read, brought Erica a bunch of flowers, and then parked in front of the Hale House.

Laura and Lydia sat on the couch with him, talking, until Derek came home. The adults ate dinner with them, and then Derek took them out to their cabin, where they were going to spend their last night together.

The cabin hadn’t been set up for heating, so they started a fire in the fireplace and snuggled down on a bed of sleeping bags, pulling up a thick blanket on top of them. Derek lay between Stiles’s legs, his body warm and smooth, sliding over Stiles’s skin. Stiles ate Derek’s sighs, licked around his mouth and his jaw and his neck, and made him hold still as soon as Derek was inside of him. He didn’t want to lose that feeling, the connection of them being together. Derek was impatient though, needing Stiles in a way that Stiles hadn’t quite prepared himself for. It was okay, he gave Derek everything he even suggested wanting, feeling Derek sliding in and out of him with just enough lube to keep things from hurting too badly. They fell asleep like that, connected, and Stiles didn’t even feel Derek sliding out of him in the middle of the night.

Derek drove him to the airport the next morning in his Camaro, and Stiles stared at him through the window of the plane, watching him from the lobby, until the plane took off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should apologize for making y'all wait so long for this, so sorry! Thanks for sticking with this story, and I promise as I get over this depression state in my life I'll do this more often. Thank you for the kind comments, because even if I didn't reply to them they actually mean a lot to me, and more often than not I use them as an excuse to not quit everything.


End file.
